Page 198 - Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals

186 Chapter 6. Imaging
“FirstName”,”LastName”,”Gender”,”Age”,”FavQuotes”

“John”,”Smith”,”M”,”47”,”Do or do not, there is no try.”

“Mary”,”Jones”,”F”,”25”,”Grey is my favourite colour.”

The first row contains the row headers or what the fields represent and is not considered a record. You’ll
notice that each field is separated by a comma but is also enclosed within quotes. The quotes are text
qualifiers and are commonly used to prevent issues when the delimiting character may also be in the
contents of the field as is the case with the first record above. Many VDP applications support more
advanced, relational databases like SQL, but a query must be performed to extract the data to be used,
which ultimately results in the same row and column record structure. The data must be attached or
assigned to the document in the page layout or VDP application.

Content

Content refers to elements displayed on each page. This would include text, graphics, and images, both
static and dynamic. Dynamic content uses placeholders, typically named by the column headers of the
data, to mark the position of the element and reference the data in the specific column of the current
record. When the document is rendered, the placeholder is replaced by the record data element.

“Dear <<FirstName>>…” becomes “Dear John…” when the document is rendered for the first record
and “Dear Mary…” for the second record, and so on. A complete document is rendered per record in the
dataset.

Business Rules

Business rules are one of the key elements that make VDP documents highly useful. They can be thought
of as a series of criteria that are checked against the data to determine what gets displayed on the
page. They can also be used to manipulate the data or filter out relevant content. In almost every case,
some level of scripting is required. Advanced VDP solutions have built-in scripting capability, utilizing
either common scripting language such as VBScript or JavaScript, or a proprietary scripting language
that is only applicable in that specific application. If the page layout tool you are using to create your
VDP document does not have scripting capability, you can apply business rules to data beforehand in a
spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel or even Google Sheets.

Figure 6.11 Logical test