Astera ReportMiner 8 – What’s New and Improved

Astera ReportMiner 8.2 is shipped with a complete UI overhaul and a number of bug fixes and improvements to the existing features. The UI has been redesigned to present a fresh, new look while also simplifying navigation and improving user experience. Here’s a summary of the improvements in Astera ReportMiner upgrade:

UI Improvements

Compared to previous versions, we have now introduced dedicated properties panel for Report Options, and Region, Pattern and Field Properties in ReportMiner.

collage

Each of these panels has a dedicated toolbar with relevant shortcut icons, making it convenient for users to specify and configure properties of the various components of a Report Model such as data regions and fields, from within a single panel.

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The main toolbar too now features shortcuts to facilitate users in creating report models.

maintoolbar

New Options for Raw Data Cleansing

Raw data cleansing is an important part of the data extraction process which brings the extracted data into a presentable, easy-to-comprehend, enterprise-ready format. We have added a couple of new options to the ‘Remove’ options used for cleansing and scrubbing the extracted data in ReportMiner.

In addition to removing extra spaces inside the text, text qualifiers (surrounding quotes), and leading and trailing spaces, you can now remove all white spaces and punctuations from within the extracted data by simply checking the ‘All White Spaces’ and ‘Punctuations’ options under the ‘Remove’ section in the Field Properties panel.

DataCleansing

These options can be applied to data irrespective of its type. This is because during extraction, the data in a field is read as text and the data cleanse options are applied to the text at that time. Once the data is cleansed, it can be converted into the appropriate data type.

Auto-Determine Field Names

While creating extraction templates for reports, you can now automatically determine field names using the ‘Auto Determine Field Name’ option. Once you’ve specified a data region, add data fields, right-click on a data field and select ‘Auto Determine Field Name’ from the context menu. This will automatically identify and update field names as they appear in a report.

Autodeterminefieldname

Other Fixes and Updates

  • OCR – We have discontinued our support for embedded OCR due to some quality issues. We are working on something similar, with better functionality which should be released soon. Meanwhile, if you need to extract data from scanned files, you can use a third-party tool for the purpose, and we will help you through its integration with ReportMiner.
  • Address Parser – Address parser functionality is not supported in Astera ReportMiner.
  • Loop through All Files in a Folder – This option was previously available in Report Options in a report model and has now been removed from there. You can use the File System Items Source to achieve the same goal.
  • Culture – We have removed the Culture dropdown from Report Options in a report model.
  • Collection Functions in Formula Fields – We have removed the collection functions from Formula Fields in Astera ReportMiner. However, you can still apply these functions in a dataflow using the Tree Transformation.