HandleBlankCell

Overview

Tabular structures represented in PDF documents can contain blank cells. Unfortunately, as there is no text in these cells they are not explicitly extracted as ‘blank’ objects, hence the Gateway configuration provides a method for inserting synthetic blank cells wherever data is missing, so that all rows align to the same column structure.

This is done via the HandleBlankCell element, defined in ObjectMergeMapping.xml, which ensures that every reconstructed row in tabular data contains a consistent number of cells.

Example configuration:

<MergeCriteria>

<ListType Value="Row" />

<Tolerance Value="14" />

<MaxExtentX Value="10" />

<MaxExtentY Value="20" />

<Separator Value="," />

<HandleBlankCell Apply="false" Value="BLANK" Offset="20" />

</MergeCriteria>

Attribute Reference

• Apply - Activates blank cell normalization logic.

  • If true:

    The widest row is used as a reference, and all other rows with missing cell values are padded with blank cells value to match its column count.

  • If false:

    Rows retain their original, possibly inconsistent, column counts.

• Value - Defines the placeholder text to insert for each synthetic blank cell.

  This value is inserted into the merged row content at each blank position.

• Offset - Sets horizontal tolerance for clustering column positions and detecting gaps.

  • Two cells with XMIN values within ±Offset are treated as belonging to the same column.

  • Used to detect missing columns in a row and insert blanks accordingly.

    Tip: Start with 10–20 of typical inter-column spacing as your offset value.

Example Configuration:

<MergeCriteria>

<ListType Value="ROW"/>

<Tolerance Value="5"/>

<MaxExtentX Value="40"/>

<MaxExtentY Value="120"/>

<Separator Value=";"/>

<HandleBlankCell Apply="true" Value="N/A" Offset="12"/>

</MergeCriteria>

Best Practices

• Tune Offset according to the typical column spacing in your source data.

Limitations

• Currently, blank cell insertion is supported only for ListType="ROW".

• The first cell of the first row should always contain a value.

  Issue	Cause	Solution
  Too many blanks inserted	Offset set too small	Increase Offset value
  Columns merged together	Offset set too large	Decrease Offset value