In addition to supporting complex file structures and a host of field types, Arbutus has specific technologies to support multiple record type files, and to present their contents as a virtual flat record. Multiple Record type processing allows Arbutus either to filter a single record type from a file or to combine data from multiple record types into a single unified tabular view for processing.
Arbutus technology includes the automatic recognition of any number of different record types and the selective conversion of appropriate data, all with no user intervention required.
Record types tend to fall into two broad categories: transaction records, containing information that only relates to the record at hand, or header records, with information that relates to the next set of records until another header is encountered. Through the use of conditional columns, Arbutus dynamically propagates information from header records to the subsequent records they relate to, without the need to transform the data. The result is, all relevant data is available for each record.