TM1 Forum

Hi All,

I am using Cognos TM1 9.5.2

i have an requirement to generate a .txt file from TM1 with fixed character space for the fields
(guess asciioutput is the only way to do this)

For eg.,
This is the format of the file specifications and their character length

Business unit - 5 character length and starting position 1
LOB- 7 character length and starting position 6
Year - 4 character length and starting position 14

While exporting to an .csv file using asciioutput, this is the part of my output

"31090","Fire","2014"
"31090","CAR\EAR","2014"
"31090","Marine","2014"

Desired or required output

31090 Fire 2014
31090 CAR\EAR 2014

As you can see, the certain LOB is not fixed to the length of 7 , some are short and longer and we have semi colons and commas

So, is there any possible way to fix these characters within this length in the asciioutput and so that the next field will start from the exact position

or is there any other command inTM1 like ascii output to achieve this

Thanks
Regards
Guru

Guru? Really? I think you should ready up on TI variables and commands before declaring one self a guru. I think you'll find that even the reference guide pretty much covers it.

Edit - written on my phone that seems to have removed extra spaces; I'd stick 7 in after v2 to guarantee its at least 7 in length after the subnm. Also I only answered after the now deleted reply to Jim's comment provided me with great amusement.

You could also play with the fill formula.

jim wood wrote:Guru? Really? I think you should ready up on TI variables and commands before declaring one self a guru. I think you'll find that even the reference guide pretty much covers it.

Hi Jim,

Guru Madhesh is my real name, 1988 is my date of birth and thats why i created an userid like guru1988 for TM1

I read in the reference guide like textoutput and outputcharacterset can be used other than asciioutput

But i need to define a particular characterset for every field and every field should start from a particular position and the additonal space in the field need to be left blank

so, is there a way to do this

Thanks
Regards
Guru Madhesh

Guru that's just brilliant. If I were you I would put your full name in your sig so it appears on all your posts.

Hi Guru,

You can use Fill function in conjunction with Long Function within it to achieve the desired result.

See if below works.

#-- Business unit
cLen = 5;
cChar = ' ';
dBU = Trim( vBusinessUnit ); (assuming this is sourced from datasource)
sBU = dBU | Fill( cChar, cLen - Long( dBU ));

#-- LOB
cLen = 7;
cChar = ' ';
dLOB = Trim( vLOB );
sLOB = dLOB | Fill( cChar, cLen - Long( dLOB ));

#-- Do the same for sYear


#-- Output to file
cDelim = ' ';
AsciiOutPut( cFile, sBU | cDelim | sLOB | cDelim | sYear );

The particular variables to which Jim was obliquely referring are DatasourceASCIIDelimiter and DatasourceASCIIQuoteCharacter which will enable you to clean out the commas and double-quote characters from your output. The name prefix "Datasource" seems to indicate that they are only relevant to sources. However they apply equally well to ASCIIOutput and TextOutput.

Hi All,

Thanks for all your replies!!!

The trim and fill functions had worked

Thanks Duncan, i had the issue in removing the string codes and i had this variable in my prolog tab
DataSourceASCIIQuoteCharacter = '';
And it did worked now!

This forum has always helped me in fixing issues and exploring new things , cheers and happy weekend!!

Thanks
Regards
Guru Madhesh