Importing Template Data

 

Once you have completed any editing to the output, it is then ready to be brought back into the Tabular BTM to have the modifications applied to your model. As with the export process, you can import from either a tab-delimited text file on disk or from tab-delimited text on the clipboard.

 

 

In order to begin the import process, you must ensure that the data:

-          Includes all column headers. These are the first row in the exported output, so you must ensure that they are included when you attempt to import the data back to the Tabular BTM.

-          Includes valid values for the Template Handle column. This is what the Tabular BTM uses to identify which template is being modified, so it must appear in the data to be imported.

If either of these conditions is not met, an error message will be displayed to indicate that no valid data could be found for importing.

In order for the import process to apply changes, you must have all the required templates selected in your model. You can ensure this by simply selecting all templates in the model prior to importing data.

 

To begin importing data, you can either:

 

Note: that importing from the clipboard is only enabled if there is text content currently on the clipboard.

 

If you have chosen to import the data from a file, you will be prompted to select the location of the file:

 

 

The import process will then begin – a progress window will be displayed if the import process takes more than a second or so, allowing you to get an estimate of how much time the import is likely to take as well as allowing you to cancel the import:

 

It is important to note that as the import process modifies the template attributes, cancelling it while it is in progress will result in some of your data potentially being modified and some of it unmodified – it is therefore your responsibility to ensure that the data remains in a valid state. A warning message will be displayed if you click Cancel:

 

Click No in this warning message to allow the import process to continue. Once the import has completed, the progress box will close automatically.

 

If the import process encountered any problems with the data for templates, the following warning message will be displayed once importing is completed:

You can dismiss the warning at this stage, but it is very useful to see the details of what values went wrong in each template. To see this, click the Show Detail button at the bottom-right corner:

In its expanded form, the window shows a list containing each value that it could not apply, grouped by template (the group titles are in the form <Template Handle>: <Template Name>). This allows you to quickly review the issues and decide on the best resolution.

One of the more powerful features of this list is that it allows you to fix the errors in-place if you want to. To edit a value, simply double-click on it in the Value column:

 

This will make the value be editable, allowing you to type in the corrected value. If the variable in question supports the use of keywords such as “<from template>”, you can also enter these into the edit box just as you would in an external editor (see the Keywords in Data Output section for details on supported keywords).

Apply your edited value by simply pressing RETURN once you are finished with the edit – if the value is now valid, it will be automatically applied and that error will be removed from the list. You can then continue to perform the same correction method on the other errors in the list. Once all errors have been fixed, the warning message will automatically close.

Note that you can close the warning message at any time by clicking the OK button – however, any remaining errors in the list will be ignored and their values in your data will not have been modified.