6.6.17 Aiding Human Readability

Sales Report Messages created in accordance with this standard are produced so that they can be ingested and processed automatically. However, when establishing a new data feed as well as for error handling during normal operation it may be helpful for humans to be able read a Sales Report Message.

It is therefore recommended, for each Record Type used in a Sales Report Message created in accordance with this standard, to include a Record that provide Cell “headings” for that Record once. The first Cell of such Records is populated with the relevant Record Type and shall be preceded by a hash symbol (“#”) in accordance with Clause 6.6.9 and as shown in Figure 4 in blue.

Note, that if such headings are over-used and/or repeated too often, they could unnecessarily inflate the file size (especially for large Sales Report Messages).

Figure 5 – Human readable layout of a Sales Report Message

Figure 5 shows the Sales Report Message loaded into a spreadsheet application, with some rows coloured to aid readability.