A data source that is correctly and clearly structured is vital if your Dotidot experience is to go without a hitch. Nonetheless, you may find yourself saddled with a source that contains a random jumble of information and data instead of a tidy list of products – the individual parameters contain more information than they should, etc. Just to give you an idea – you have a _product_name_ variable which features not only the product name, but also the name of the manufacturer. But you don’t actually want the name of the manufacturer to be present in the product name, so how do you extract what you need from the variable? Create your own variable!
In the data source menu, click the Variables section, and you’ll see a list of all variables contained in the source. The variables you’re going to create will later be displayed here as well. So, let’s get down to business and click the Create text variable button.
You will see a window with variables options. You'll choose the Text variable.
The custom variable consists of a name (1.) and an input text (2.).
Give your variable such a name that lets you know what value it communicates.
In the Input text box, you’ll find variables that can be simply dragged into different fields. Only those variables which are turned on (be they original, or those created by you) are displayed here; the ones that are turned off aren’t shown.
EXAMPLE: Let’s create our own “clean name” variable. As the input text, use the _name_ variable which contains the product’s name including serial numbers.
(3.) We will insert the prepared regular expression into the exchange, which you will find under the button ‘Regular expressions templates’ and replace it with empty text - this will remove the serial number. On the right side, we have a preview of the input and output text, so we can easily check whether the set adjustments are correct.
In Variable editor, you can find other options how to adjust and shorten.