Patterns Profiler

Use this topic for a simple page, dialog or other UI without any sections or tabs. You must describe every field and option on the page.

To configure this topic so it generates correctly in the help output, perform the following steps:

1. Configure the Sect1 element:

   1. Create the context-sensitive topic as a Sect1.

   2. Title the context-sensitive topic to reflect the name of the UI, using a simple noun phrase with headline-style capping. In the page title, include the generic noun. For example, Preferences Page, Preferences Dialog, Editing Window, Resource Catalog. If this is a topic that you are migrating, use the same title as before..

   3. Set the HelpTOC attribute to TopicOnly, so this topic does not appear in the TOC.

   4. Modify the sample OutputFileName attribute of the element to include the name of your UI and optionally include the product name. For example, if your product is Oracle XYZ Server and the UI is the Preferences Dialog, modify the value of this attribute from cs_pagename1.htm to something like cs_preferences.htm or xyz_cs_preferences.htm.

   5. Modify the HelpTopicID attribute to match the topicID for the Help icon, button, or UI.

      Use the topicID provided by the engineer as the value for the HelpTopicID attribute for the Sect1 topic. If converting help from another format, use the existing HelpTopicID. Alternatively, you can assign a topicID to the topic and then provide the engineer with the topicID you assigned. The important thing is to make sure the topicID you assign to the topic in FrameMaker matches the topicID assigned to the UI, Help icon or button by development.

2. Configure the InformalTable element with the following guidelines:

   1. Modify the Summary and Title attributes as appropriate for the table.

   2. In the Element column, enter all the elements or options in the UI that should be documented, using the HelpPara element. In the Element column, do not bold the UI element.

   3. To indent the text in the Element column in order to groups the elements as they display in the UI, edit the Role attribute of the HelpPara element. Select Level1 to indent the text from the left margin. You can indent up to four levels to reflect the organization of options displayed in the UI, if needed, using Level1, Level2, Level3, and Level4.

   4. In the Description column, use the Para element, not the HelpPara element. You will not indent text in this column. Describe the option or element in detail. If you reference UI elements other than the one you are describing, use the Bold emphasis. If you provide a code snippet or code reference, apply the Code emphasis.

   5. In the Description column, include More inline links to conceptual topics in administrator, developer and user guides in the documentation library; include How? inline links to individual task topics in these books. Do not include inline links for other information. Instead, include those other links under the Related Topics heading, as described below.

   6. To insert More and How? link to books, use the Xulink element and for the Attribute value, enter olink:DOCID (for example, olink:ASADM11113). For more detailed information about linking, see the topic Applying TopicID Values and Adding Links to Books in the online help standards.

   7. In both the Element and Description columns, add inline graphics where necessary, as described below. Use inline graphics sparingly, only as needed, to provide UI overviews and define unlabeled elements on screen. Icons and buttons are not required in context sensitive online help.

   8. Inline graphics are limited to a height of 22 pixels. If you insert an image that exceeds 22 pixels in height, the image will be reduced and distorted in the OHW/OHJ help JAR, so do not insert it. There are no specific restrictions to the pixel width of an image, however images that fill more than half a column would be better inserted as informal figures in the introductory paragraphs.

3. To insert an inline graphic, follow these guidelines:

   1. Select the location where you want to insert the inline graphic.

   2. In the Elements window, select InlineGraphic, and click Insert. The Attributes for New Element window appears.

   3. Type the AltText value. This is a required attribute and the book will fail if you do not enter some text. Click Insert Element. The Import dialog appears.

   4. Select the graphic to be imported from the graphics folder. The Import Graphic Scaling dialog appears.

   5. Select 72 dpi. Click Set. The graphic is inserted.

   6. Using the spacebar, insert one space before or after the graphic as needed, so there is a single space between the image and text. A single space is required between an image and text before or after it (identical to the space between words). No extra space should be added before an image at the beginning of a line.

4. To include the RelatedTopics element and links, follow these guidelines:

   1. The RelatedTopics element is the last element in a Sect1 element and is mandatory. It is included in the template and does not need to be inserted.

   2. The only child element available under the RelatedTopics element is the Para element. You can add multiple Para elements under the RelatedTopics element, in addition to those already in the template.

   3. Add any topics about technologies mentioned, if they are not covered by inline How? and More links.

   4. Add additional cross references to chapters or Sect1s in the documentation library.

   5. To insert link to books, use the Xulink element and for the Attribute value, enter olink:DOCID (for example, olink:ASADM11113). For more detailed information about linking, see the topic Applying TopicID Values and Adding Links to Books in the online help standards.

The Patterns Profiler analyzes data values in any number of String attributes and assigns them patterns according to the sequence of character types. For example, the value "10 Lowestoft Lane" is assigned a pattern of NN_aaaaaaaaa_aaaa, using the default Pattern Map reference list.

Note:

The default *Base Tokenization map is designed for use with Latin-1 encoded data, as are the alternative *Unicode Base Tokenization and *Unicode Character Pattern maps. If these maps are not suited to the character-encoding of the data, it is possible to create and use a new one to take account of, for example, multi-byte Unicode (hexadecimal) character references.

The profiler then counts up the number of times each pattern occurs in each attribute, and presents its results.

Use the Patterns Profiler to uncover the patterns in your data, and to create reference lists of valid and invalid patterns that can be used to validate the data on an ongoing basis, using a Check Pattern processor.

The following tables describe the configuration options:

Configuration	Description
Inputs	Specify any String attributes that you want to analyze for data patterns.
Options	Specify the following option: Character Pattern Map: maps each character to a pattern character. Specified as Reference Data (Pattern Generation Category). Default value is *Character Pattern Map.

The default Standard Pattern Map maps characters as follows:

Character Type	Representation in Pattern
Alpha characters (a-z, or A-Z)	a
Number characters (0-9)	N
Punctuation characters, such as semi-colons, commas	Represented as they are.
Control characters (for example, carriage returns)	C
Space	_

Characters that are not recognized by the Character Pattern Map are represented with a question mark (?) in each pattern.

You can use a different Character Pattern Map to map characters as you want - for example to represent unusual letters such as x and z differently from more common letters.

Configuration	Description
Outputs	Describes any data attribute or flag attribute outputs.
Data Attributes	None.
Flags	The following flag is output: [Attribute name].Pattern: indicates the pattern of the attribute. Possible values are the patterns defined by the Pattern Map Reference data.

The following table describes the statistics produced by the profiler for each attribute it analyzes:

Statistic	Description
Pattern	The generated pattern for each value.
Length	The length of each generated pattern; that is, the number of characters in each value.
Count	The number of records with values in the attribute that matched the pattern.
%	The percentage of records with values in the attribute that matched the pattern.

Example

In this example, the Patterns Profiler is used to analyze patterns in all attributes of a table of Customer records. For each attribute, the following type of view is generated:

Pattern	Length	Count	%
NN-NNNNN-aa	11	1681	84.0
N-NNNN-aa	10	310	15.5
aa-NNNNN-aa	11	4	0.2
NN-NNN-aa	9	2	<0.1
NN-N-aa	7	1	<0.1
NN-NNNNN-Na	11	1	<0.1
[Null]	10	1	<0.1
NN-NNNNN	9	1	<0.1

By sorting the view by the Count column, you can quickly find the most common and least common patterns in the data, enabling you to construct valid and invalid patterns lists for use in a Pattern Check.