Edit Failures Table Overview

The Edit Failures table contains information about failing edits using the currently selected data file and edit profile. It can be used by solution programs to enable implementation of the logic necessary to perform error detection and correction.

The edit failures for a data connection (at scan-time, only a single record is available) are obtained when you specify an edit profile with your scanning application.The Edit Failures table exists whether an edit profile has been specified or not. If no edit profile has been specified, the Edit Failures table will contain zero rows.

Each row in the Edit Failures table represents a single edit failing for a particular data record. For example:

• If a data file with 100 rows is specified along with an edit profile and each record fails two edits, then the Edit Failures table will contain 200 rows.
• If a data file with 100 rows is specified along with an edit profile and no records have edit failures, then the table will have zero rows.

EditFailureID is composed by concatenating serial number and edit number. It is a convenient way to quickly query for a particular edit failure following an update.

The Message field saves the application programmer from having to perform string formatting themselves.

WARNING: Do not create a document with the .Application Definition Naming Restrictions See also: unpredictable.will be behavior Editing. in the scanning application" "Edit Failures title

Retrieving Edit Failures

Following are suggestions for how to retrieve particular edit failures followed by an example of how to correct edit failures:

Correcting Edit Failures

From an implementation standpoint, the Edit Failures table is completely dynamic – any time a row is queried, the edit rules are applied to the selected data records to generate the data on the fly. Because of this, we recommend you do not query the entire table over and over. The query processor will detect search conditions that limit queries to a single Serial Number or EditFailureID, so targeted searches such as (select * from [Edit Failures] where [Serial Number] = 1) perform well.

The Edit Failures table allows you to write a replacement for the ScanTools Data Editor. Because of the dynamic nature of the table, where all queries result in applying edits to the data, we recommend the following model:

1. First, query for all rows in the table. This imposes a start up performance penalty but unless the number of records is very large it will likely be a small penalty. If the number of records is very large, the maximum number of rows to return can be limited using OLE DB, or the number of records can be limited to a range of serial numbers.
2. Loop through the rows and present the data to the user for correction (correction can be done by using the paper documents or the clips from the CLIPS table).
3. As each edit is corrected, use an UPDATE command to update the particular edit that fails.
4. To verify that the corrected data passes the edit, select using the EditFailureID of the edit that was just corrected. If no data is returned, the correction was successful. If a row is returned, update the failure message appropriately and try the correction again.

For example, to update a failing field following correction:

Update [Edit Failures] set Value = ‘foobar’ where EditFailureID = ‘0012340020’

Following an update, to check if the edit still fails:

Select * from [Edit Failures] where EditFailureID = ‘0012340020’.

If 0 rows are returned, the edit has been corrected.

Note that only the Value column is updateable, so any attempt to change other columns will fail. For this reason INSERT and DELETE statements will fail as well.

"Always Display" Edit Type

Edits with a type of "Always Display" will always show up in the Edit Failures table but if no actual failure exists, the FailureMode field will be set to efmAlwaysDisplay. To exclude these edits you can customize your select query:

Select * from [edit failures] where FailureMode <> 32

Note that the SQL interpreter is not aware of the values of enumerations, so the actual literal value has to be provided.