Profiler

JBerd Profiler

Overview

The purpose of the profiler is to provide a report on the values and frequency of occurrence of fields and structures in an input file.

This enables us to learn:

• The observed values in data fields
• Which fields are unique within a file
• Which fields have limited value sets, and what those values are
• Which fields are optional
• Which fields are mandatory
• Which combinations of optional fields occur within records
• The observed count of repeating items

Consider, for example, a BER encoded file that contains many records, called “Xrecords” and that each Xrecord may contain fields A, B, and C, of which A and B are mandatory C is not.
The profiler will show:

At the record level The total number of records seen, and the number of records with each combination of fields. So if there were 100 records, all of which contained A and B but only 10% contained C, we would see the counts of the different combinations as follows:

• A,B,C 10 (only 10% contain C)
• A,B 90 (90% contain only A and B)

At the field level The total number of instances of each field, the total number of distinct values, and the first 100 distinct values. So if, in our example, A was a unique id then we would see there would have been 100 instances and 100 distinct values. But if C was a Y/N flag, and only one of the instances was “N” we would see 10 values, 2 distinct values, and a count of each distinct value: Y(9); N(1).

Field names and values

The output of the profiler identifies fields and records by name, provided that such names have been defined in an input alias file. See [Tags and Aliases]

The way in which the field values is printed (rendered) is governed by the default rendering method provided in the alias file. See4 [Rendering]

Further Information

To see how alias names and types are associated with BER data items see [Tags and Aliases]
To see how the binary BER data is rendered as printable output see [Rendering]

For full documentation see Jberd.pdf