S3.0 - Overview of an XML Configuration file

Below is a simple list summarising the sections of the XML Configuration that will be described in more detail in the following articles. If you are unsure about a particular section, refer ahead though the explanation to be sure as it may cause the application to not work properly in your case if not configured correctly.

• Match Keys – Define the keys that you wish to use for fuzzy matching, exact matching, and duplicate prevention matching.
• General Settings – Define the various general settings you wish to use during processing.
• Output Settings – Define the schemas you wish to use to produce custom ‘matches’ and ‘grouped matches’ tables from the standard ones produced by matchIT SQL.
• Data Sources – Defined the tables and mappings for your database(s) here.
• matchIT API Settings – Configure the matchIT API settings you wish to use in this section.

Lastly, there are a couple of amendments that need to be made to the sql script files GenerateKeys.sql and FindMatches.sql which are part of the demo files included with install by default. If you open the file in SQL Server Management Studio, the lines that need modifying are the following:

EXEC msp_BulkGenerateKeys @config='C:\matchIT SQL\demo\Config.xml', @dataSourceID='1'

EXEC msp_FindMatches @config='C:\matchIT SQL\demo\Config.xml', @dataSourceID='1'

EXEC msp_GroupMatches @config='C:\matchIT SQL\demo\Config.xml', @dataSourceID='1', @level='individual'

As well as optionally the output SP's such as. 

EXEC msp_OutputMatchingGroups @config='C:\matchIT SQL\demo\config\Config.xml', @dataSourceID='1'

Simply substitute ‘@dataSourceID='1'’ for whichever data source you wish to perform the procedures on and ‘@level='individual'’ for whichever level you wish to group the matches at (with the levels being individual, family, household, business and custom).

Note here how all the procedures listed above accept 2 common parameters – one is the file path to the configuration file with your desired set up for the process, and the other is the id of the data source in the configuration for the procedure to run on.

You can also have two or more data sources in a single XML. If you need to match across two data sources, you would still call procedures such as msp_BulkGenerateKeys similarly, but you would use alternate procedures such as msp_FindMatches and pass 3 parameters instead, which would include the file path, and the main datasource as well as the overlap datasource.