Fill in a Dropdown Field From a Spreadsheet

Have you ever thought of having an enum data field in Rossum’s validation screen where the reviewer could select one of the values from a dropdown menu? Such data fields could represent a list of vendors, currencies, or document types.

In this article, we will present how you can easily create, delete, and modify the enum values. Moreover, we will show how to quickly synchronize Rossum with your Google spreadsheet.

Creating a new enum field

To create a new enum field, do the following steps:

1. Click on the settings icon on the document dashboard

2. Click on the target queue

3. Open the schema editor by clicking on the “Edit schema” button

4. Add a new enum data field into one of the sections with at the least the following fields:

   1. “category”: “datapoint”

   2. “type”: “enum”

   3. “label”: “My enum”

   4. “id”: “my_enum”

   5. “rir_field_names”: []

   6. “options”: []

Such enum field could look like this:

{
        "rir_field_names": [],
        "constraints": {
          "required": false
        },
        "default_value": null,
        "category": "datapoint",
        "id": "my_enum",
        "label": "My Enum",
        "type": "enum",
        "options": []
      },

If done correctly, you should see a new empty enum data field in the left sidebar of the schema editor which you could open by clicking on the enum icon.

Adding new items

Once the enum field is in place, you can add new items by filling the ID and Label fields:

• ID: the ID of the selected value which will appear in the exported data. Usually it is the internal value of the item in the ERP/AP system.

• Label: the text which is visible to the user in the user interface when selecting the option.

Removing items

To delete an item, click on the red “bin” icon next to the item. If necessary, you can delete all of the items at once by clicking on the “bin” icon at the top right of the enum preview.

Pasting values from the spreadsheet

Now, we will reveal an absolutely brilliant part of this feature. Imagine you are keeping a list of your vendors in a Google or Excel spreadsheet and you want to enable Rossum users to select one of these vendors whenever they process a document. In an ideal state, you would sync your Google sheets data and Rossum’s vendor list.

You can now do this synchronization by selecting and copying the vendor data from the spreadsheet and pasting it in the enum field.

Additionally, you can paste the list of items by navigating to one of the enum’s input fields and using the CTRL+V shortcut.

Keeping the list up to date

From time to time, you might be adding new vendors to the spreadsheet. In this case, you can simply copy a new item and paste it into an empty enum input with CTRL+V.

Or you could just copy all the items (with the newly added ones) and then overwrite the existing options by clicking on the “Paste from clipboard” icon in the top right of the enum preview.

Backing up the enum values

Finally, you might want to back up the options that populate Rossum’s enum field. To enable you to do so, we have added a “Copy to clipboard” icon.

Automatically matching values

The solution above let’s you pick the right value manually.