file in structured-field format. ACIF inserts these same structured fields in the index
object file. (The tags are contained in Tagged Logical Element [TLE] structured
fields, which are described in Appendix A, Helpful Hints and 36) You can use the
indexing-tag structured fields to identify a group of pages.1Figure 5 shows the
relationship between the group-level tags and the entries in the index object file.
Figure 5. AFP Document with Index Tags and the Index Object File
ACIF can create an index object file for the following types of input files:
S/370 line-mode data or mixed-mode data
Unformatted ASCII data
AFP data produced by the AFP Application Programming Interface, Document
Composition Facility (DCF), or by AFP Toolbox, with or without indexing tags
Note: In this instance, you are producing an index object file from an input file
that contains index tags. You are not adding new indexing tags to an
existing file.
AFP data produced by any other application
ACIF provides the following ways for you to generate the indexing tags placed in
the print file:
Using values present in the input data itself, when the data has been formatted
so that ACIF can reliably locate the values. This kind of indexing is called
indexing with data values.
Using literal values that you specify to ACIF, which is useful when the values
you want to use in the indexing tags are not consistently present in the data.
This kind of indexing is called
indexing with literal values.Indexing with Data Values:
Some applications such as payroll or accounting
statements contain data that might be appropriate to use for indexing tags. In the
bank statement example, the account number is a type of data value that you may
want to tag. You can then archive a single customer's account statement using the
1With ACIF, you can generate group-level tags; with Document Composition Facility (DCF), AFP Toolbox, and AFP Application
Programming Interface (AFP API), you can generate both group-level tags and page-level tags. These products will be described
later in this chapter.
Chapter 1. Planning Your AFP Conversion and Indexing Facility (ACIF) Application 11