Creating Parsing Rules

You may need to configure your own parsing rules. Parsing rules can extract data from a specific position in e-mail messages, or they can search messages for special parsing tags, which are text strings that denote the information you need to extract.

NOTE: Parsing tags should be used only in situations where you can control the format and the content of incoming messages. For example, for parsing messages from internal ERP or monitoring systems.

To create a parsing rule:

1. From the Sidebar, navigate to E-mail Processing > Parsing and click New. The Edit Field dialog box appears.

2. Under Field, specify the properties of the virtual e-mail field that will store the value extracted from the e-mail message during parsing:

   1. In the Name field, type the field name.

   2. Choose the field type from the Type drop-down list. The field type should match the type of extracted data.

      INFO: For information on field types, see User-defined field types.

   3. Optionally, type the description for the field.

3. Under Parsing Rule, configure the rule:
   1. In the Extract value from list, select the place in the e-mail message where the parser will look for the value to extract. You can extract the value from the message body (Content) or from any standard e-mail header, i.e. Sender, To, Subject, etc. If you want to obtain the value of any other e-mail header, select Custom header field and specify the field name in the text box below.

      INFO: For information on e-mail header fields, see RFC-2822 “Internet Message Format” at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822.

   2. For Logical type:

      In the Check For field, type a string to search for.

      For example, you can check whether the message body contains a specific word (for example, APPROVED or REJECTED) for further processing by the workflow engine. If the word is found, the parsing rule returns TRUE, otherwise it returns FALSE.

   3. Specify the start point for extracting the value:
      • To extract the value after a certain text marker, select the following text in the Starting after drop-down list and type that text string.
      • To extract the value at a certain character position in text, select the following position and type the position.
   4. Specify the end point:
      • To specify the end marker, select the following text in the Continues until drop-down list and type that text string.
      • You can choose another way to determine the end point until which the data is extracted: end of line, any of the following characters, or number of characters read is equal to, and enter the required text or number.

4. By default, the parsing rule is not case sensitive. For example, MessageID:T012345# and MESSAGEID:T012345# will produce the same result. If you want the parsing rule to be case sensitive, select the Case Sensitive check box.

5. By default, the parser removes spaces at the start and end of the extracted value. For example, the expression MessageID: T012345 # would extract T012345. If you do not want the parser to remove leading and trailing spaces, clear the Remove leading and trailing spaces check box.

6. Click OK to save your changes and close the Edit Field dialog box.