ACL Functions, Scripts and Other

Cool Stuff
Randy Folsom
Global Internal Audit
Day of Learning
20 April 2006

Applied Materials Confidential

ACL Heads-up
 Gotchas
– Nulls are replaced with the blank character (ASCII character 32)
– ACL does not handle time
– Numbers are defaulted to zero (0)
 7 / 3 = 2, 1.0 * 7 / 3 = 2.3, 1.000 * 7 / 3 = 2.333
– Joins vs. Relations
 Good to know
– Copying records => copies the formulas
– Copying fields => copies only the values
– Dates must be formatted before importing
– Clean up data: Export table using OS/390 (FMT format, then re-import)
– Single quote around dates is the ` character (top left key), not the ‘ character
next to the Enter button.
– Avoid table and field names with spaces if possible
 Personalization Options
– Match can be set to Exact
– Files associated with tables can be deleted when tables are deleted
– Timeout setting can be increased from 10 to 100

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Data Import Options and Limitations
 Cannot handle
– HTML
– Wrapped reports with variable structure
 Good for Oracle reports with predictable structure
 Works well with Excel provided dates and numbers are formatted
correctly
 Works best with Access or simple text files such as exports from
BRIO or Oracle Views.

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Typical Report from SAP (Vendor Master)

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ACL Scripts
 Scripts are very similar to Excel Macros.
 Can except user input such as date ranges, and filter or threshold
criteria.
 Three ways to create scripts:
– Log files (table history) can be converted to scripts
– Script Recorder can save user actions to create scripts
– Scripts can be written manually
 Some types of actions are not logged by the ACL and thus must
be manually added to scripts. For instance to relate two tables
requires creating an index. ACL will record the relation
command, but will not record the creation of the index.
 Limited error handling is facilitated by creating multiple scripts
that call each other.

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ACL Functions
 A function is a routine that performs a calculation and returns a
value.
 ACL has eight groups of functions
– Bit and Character (not commonly used),
– Conversion (not commonly used),
– Date and Time (includes Age and numeric/string to date conversion),
– Logical (comparison and other tests),
– Mathematical (includes absolute, frequency, min, max, random),
– Financial (useful for investments and banking),
– Miscellaneous (not commonly used), and
– String Access (used for cleanup and formatting fields to assist with
analysis).
 Functions perform in various ways. Some like the conversion and
math, work on individual records. Others like the logical
functions apply to the entire column and are commonly used as
filters. There are no aggregate functions, such as Average and
Sum, in ACL except via Classify.

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ACL Functions (cont.)
 Some commonly used functions
– Find() Tests for the presence of a string of characters
– Match() Compare a field’s value to a series of other values
– Between() Tests for a range (inclusive)
– Map() Looks for a specific format (! not blank, ? any
character, 9 any number, X,x any letter)
– Exclude() Removes unwanted characters
– Include() Only specified characters are returned
– CTOD() Converts strings or numeric values into dates
– Age() Returns the age in days
– Rand() Returns a number between 0 and a provided
number

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