The following is an example of a text file containing data sets well-suited to External AutoFill Keyword Sets. The combined values, which are used to trigger the AutoFills, are relatively short and easy to enter. This may or may not be true of your data. When determining the best indexing method for your solution, weigh the cost of manually entering the combined values to trigger the External AutoFill Keyword Sets against the cost of selecting the individual values from drop-down lists for Cascading Data Sets.
Example:
An unaltered text file contains the following data sets:
0000,0001,Gillie's Wonder World 0000,0002,Kevin's Water Park 0000,0003,Huff and Puff Funland 0001,0001,Tumblers & Mumblers 0001,0002,Jake's Java 0001,0003,Mama's Cooking 0002,0001,Horror Hacienda 0002,0002,Sam's Storehouse 0002,0003,The Wandering Eyeglass
To differentiate between data sets that contain the same values for the same Keywords (e.g., 0000, 0001, etc.), add a unique value to each data set. To help associate these new values with their corresponding data sets, make the new values the combinations of their data sets' first two entries.
The modified data sets will now contain the following values:
0000,0001,Gillie's Wonder World,00000001 0000,0002,Kevin's Water Park,00000002 0000,0003,Huff and Puff Funland,00000003 0001,0001,Tumblers & Mumblers,00010001 0001,0002,Jake's Java,00010002 0001,0003,Mama's Cooking,00010003 0002,0001,Horror Hacienda,00020001 0002,0002,Sam's Storehouse,00020002 0002,0003,The Wandering Eyeglass,00020003
With these new, combined values in place in the text file, ensure that a column is also added to the corresponding database table to account for these values. Then set these combined values as the Primary Keywords of their corresponding External AutoFill Keyword Sets using a SQL Select String query.
For example:
SELECT Chain Number, Store Number, Account Name, Chain Number & Store Number FROM Stores WHERE Chain Number & Store Number = @primary
For more information on configuring External AutoFill Keyword Sets and their corresponding SQL queries, see Configuring External AutoFill Keyword Sets and Creating SQL Statements to Enable External AutoFill Keyword Sets, respectively.
Once the External AutoFill Keyword Sets are configured for the data sets, the combined values can be entered in the Primary Keyword Type fields to trigger the AutoFills when indexing.