PDI File Structure

Note that you never edit a PDI file. Examining its contents, however, can be useful in a debugging situation where you want to verify the values it contains are the ones you expect.

The PDI format described here is in the native format PlanetPress Image generates and PlanetPress Search reads. If you are examining a PDI file in XML format, you should not have difficulty locating the information described here, in the XML file.

Each entry in the PDI file has the syntax:

~<name>=<value>

For example, the entry:

~FormName=conference.ps4

has the name FormName and the value conference.ps4. A PDI file uses the following entries:

Name:	Value:
_{~SearchDBName}	The name you defined in PlanetPress for the database record for the document. This is the name of the record PlanetPress Search creates for this document in any search database it builds that contains the document. If you did not define a name for the database record, PlanetPress Image sets this entry to the value of the _~FormName entry. This is the name you see in the Document box when you set up a search.
_~FormName	The name of the converted document (in your PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tool Documents folder) that PlanetPress Image executed to generate this PDI and its associated PDF. PlanetPress Search uses the value of this entry to determine which of the PDF files in a PlanetPress Image archive folder were generated from the same document. If you did not define a name for the database record for this document (see the _{~SearchDBName} description), it also uses this value as the name of the record it creates for this document in any search database it builds that contains the document. For example, consider two PDI files, report1.pdi and report2.pdi. Neither of these documents had a name defined for their database record during document design in PlanetPress. Both of their FormName entries have the value report.ps4. In this case, PlanetPress Search would create a database record called report and include the information from both PDI files in that record.
_~ArchiveFile	The name, minus the file name extension, of this PDI file (and its corresponding PDF file). You set this name in your PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tool when you configure the PlanetPress Image output task.
_{~ArchiveMethod}	The type of file (PDF, TIFF, or JPEG) generated by PlanetPress Image. Note that although PlanetPress Image can generate image files of type TIFF and JPEG, you cannot use PlanetPress Search to search an archive of these image files. Consult the PlanetPress Workflow Tool User Guide for further help understanding this feature of PlanetPress Image.
_~Time	The time that PlanetPress Image created this PDI file, expressed as hours:minutes:seconds.
_~Date	The day that PlanetPress Image created this PDI file, expressed as year/month/day.
_{~IndexName:<field length>}	The name of an index term used in the PDF file. You specify this name when you create the index term in PlanetPress. PlanetPress Image makes a list of the names of all index terms used in the PDF, and places them in the first part of the PDI file. The field length is either the length of the data selection you created in PlanetPress, or the default field size you set in PlanetPress Search, whichever is greater.
_~FieldName _<values>	The name of an index term, followed by a list of the values this term takes on, on a given page of the PDF file.
_~Page	The page number of the PDF file that contains all the FieldName entries above it and below the preceding page number.