Files Types and Data Format

The shared platform data files discussed in this chapter may use a standard comma-delimited (CSV) file format, with text strings enclosed by quotation marks or other characters. The files must be UTF-8 encoded; other encoding types such as ANSI are not supported and may fail in the loads due to unrecognized characters. The files expect the first line to be column headers, and lines 2+ should contain the input data. For specific columns in each of these files, the following standards can be used as a guideline (though they can be changed by configuration options).

Table 8-1 Foundation File Formatting

Datatype	Format	Example	Explanation
Number	0.00	340911.10	Numbers should be unformatted with periods for decimal places. Commas or other symbols should not be used within the numerical values.
Character	“abc”	“Item #4561”	Any alphanumeric string can be optionally enclosed by quotation marks to encapsulate special characters such as commas in a descriptive value. Unique identifier columns, like ITEM ID, that are CHAR or VARCHAR2 datatypes require careful attention, because any characters in the string will be a part of that identifier, even spaces and underscores. For example, “ abc” and “abc “ are treated as different values unless you perform trimming on the field to remove spaces.
Date	YYYYMMDD	20201231	Dates should be provided as simple 8-digit values with no formatting in year-month-day sequences.