7.18 Aiding human readability

Sales/Usage Reports created in accordance with the DSR standard are designed so that they can be ingested and processed automatically. However, when establishing a new message exchange it may be helpful for humans to be able read a Sales/Usage Report. The same may be true for error handling during normal operations.

It is therefore recommended, for each Record type used in a Sales/Usage Reportcreated in accordance with the DSR standard, to include, above the first actual Record data, an additional Record that sets out, once, all the Cell “headings” for that particular Record.

The first Cell of the “headings” Record shall be populated with the relevant Record identifier, preceded by a hash symbol (“#”) in accordance with Clause 7.7 and as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5 – Human readable layout of a Sales/Usage Report created in accordance with the DSR standard

Figure 5 shows a Sales/Usage Report created in accordance with the DSR standard loaded into a spreadsheet application, with some rows coloured to aid readability.

When creating such “headings” Records, the licensee should ensure that it uses (i) the correct Record identifier for the profile version used, (specifically, the correct version of the Record identifier) and (ii) the correct Cell names. While failing to do this will not cause automated ingestion of the Sales/Usage Report to fail as these lines are ignored during ingestion, they might lead to licensors questioning whether the remainder of the Sales/Usage Report is following the relevant DSR standard correctly.