Can the OL developers introduce a feature whereby one can lookup additional data from within external PDFs in the datamapper?
My main data file could be, text, csv, xml, database or even another PDF. Additional data which complements my records is from other external PDFs on disk or on a network location that is only accessible by the Connect service account (for the purpose of security) as we do not want users to open and view the content of the additional PDF.
Is there anyway to currently achieve this in the datamapper? If not, could this feature be added to the datamapper?
Having the DataMapper do that would require it to be able to open secondary data files, in a multitude of formats. It’s already feasible with a database (using a script), but I think your example is too much of a corner case to benefit many other users.
You should use Workflow to do this, because it’s more suited to switching data files on the fly and extracting additional information that can then be added to the data model.
I have also already answered your other related post about validating a DM config without having to actually run the job.