Each organization's documents are unique. Appian's Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is flexible enough to allow you to tailor the application to your organization's needs.
IDP comes out-of-the box with Invoice, Purchase Order, Claim, and Receipt document types. If your organization has different documents that it wants to use, you can also add new document types.
Each of these document types are set up to extract certain fields. This page provides instructions for adding and removing fields so that you can modify the information that is extracted from each document type.
These instructions are specific to MySQL databases. If you use a different database, you may need to modify the steps.
We suggest always adding and removing fields, instead of updating fields. This will make sure that the table columns and custom data type (CDT) fields match.
See Mapping Custom Data Types (CDTs) to Pre-defined Database Tables for more information about making changes to existing CDTs.
If you're an Appian developer that needs to capture more data than what exists in the default document types of IDP, you can add fields to the document type's CDT.
In order to extract more fields for a document type, you will need to add the new field to the CDT and verify the data store.
In order to extract more information for a document type, you first need to add the new field to the CDT. See Appian Document Extraction to learn more about best practices for creating a new CDT and setting up the CDT fields for document extraction.
There are some extra steps we recommend to make sure the CDT field's column in the database table can accept large character values. Appian Text
fields automatically use VARCHAR(255)
for the column definition in the associated database table. This means that you can only write data to the column in the database table if it is 255 characters or less. Therefore, we recommend updating the column definition to text
, which can handle more data. To do this, you will need to update the CDT using an XSD file.
To add the new field to the CDT:
DU_Invoice
DU_PurchaseOrder
DU_Claim
DU_Receipt
text
for the column definition.
<xsd:appinfo source="appian.jpa">@Column(length=255)</xsd:appinfo>
to <xsd:appinfo source="appian.jpa">@Column(columnDefinition="text")</xsd:appinfo>
Verifying the data store adds the new field to the database table and makes sure that the CDT field names and data types match the database column names and data types.
See Data Stores for more information about editing data stores.
To verify the data store:
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
application, open the DU Data Store
object.If you added a field and want to remove it, or if you want to remove fields from the default document types in IDP, you can remove these fields as long as the document type has not been used in production yet. If you want to remove fields from the default document type, it is best to do this during the initial application set up.
The only time you should delete fields is before you have started to use the document type in production. Otherwise, any reconciliation tasks that are already in process in production will error when they try to write the data to the database.
In order to stop extracting fields for a document type, you will need to remove the associated column from the database table, remove the field from the CDT, and verify the data store.
Before making any changes in Appian Designer, you must first update the database table.
To update the database table:
duinvoice
dupurchaseorder
duclaim
dureceipt
To delete the supplier
field from the duinvoice
table, you could execute a database command like the following. Note that this example uses MySQL syntax.
1
ALTER TABLE `duinvoice` DROP `supplier`;
After you have updated the database table, you can remove the field from the CDT.
See Mapping Custom Data Types (CDTs) to Pre-defined Database Tables for more information about making changes to CDTs.
DU_Invoice
DU_PurchaseOrder
DU_Claim
DU_Receipt
Verifying the data store makes sure that the CDT is mapped and ready to be used in IDP.
See Data Stores for more information about editing data stores.
To verify the data store:
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
application, open the DU Data Store
object.