Group And Format

Group And Format brings together the records that share the value of a field and, for each group, writes a single text that joins the information of all its records using the template you define. It is useful for preparing summaries or documents per customer, per category or by any other criterion.

When to use it

You have a list of incidents and want one text per customer with all of theirs, so an agent can summarise it.
You want to prepare one document per product category with each product’s description.
You need to put together all the survey answers per department before analysing them.

Configuration

Field	What it does
Key Column	The field to group by, for example `customer`. Values that differ only in upper case or spaces are treated as the same group.
Data	The records you want to group.
Template	How each record is written inside the group’s text. Put a field name in braces to insert its value, for example `{date}: {description}`. Default: `{text}`.

Advanced options

Field	What it does
Separator	What goes between one record and the next inside the group’s text. Default: a line break.
Metadata keys	Extra fields, separated by commas, that you want to keep in each group. They are taken from the group’s first record.

Output

The Processed Data output returns one record per group, with:

text: the group’s text, with all its records written according to Template and joined with Separator.
The Key Column field with the group’s value.
id: the group’s value in lower case and with underscores instead of spaces.
The Metadata keys fields, if you set any.

Example

A technical support team wants a weekly report per customer.

Connect the week’s incident list to Data.
In Key Column, type customer.
In Template, type {date} - {type}: {description}.
Connect Processed Data to an agent that writes, for each customer, a summary of their incidents from the text field.

Good practices

Use as Key Column a field every record has, such as a name or a code. Numbers are grouped by their value; records without that field are put together in one group with an empty id.

Group By Keys: groups records keeping their data as a list, without turning it into text.
Parse Data: turns records into text with a template, without grouping.