Modifying a Domain

A domain represents a type of data such as name, address, and phone number data. It consists of a pattern that represents a sequence of one or more tokens in your input data that you commonly need to parse and that you associate with one or more cultures.

This topic describes how to modify a domain.

  1. In Enterprise Designer, go to Tools > Open Parser Domain Editor.
  2. Click the Domains tab.
  3. Select a domain in the list and then click Modify. The Modify Domain dialog box displays.
  4. Change the description information.
  5. If you only want to modify the description of the domain, click OK. If you have made updates to the template domain and now want to add those changes to the domain you are modifying, then continue to the next step.
  6. Select Use another domain as a template to inherit changes made to the domain template.
  7. Select a domain pattern template from the list. When you click OK in the next step, the domain pattern will be modified. The modified domain pattern will contain all of the culture-specific parsing grammars defined in the domain pattern template that you selected. Any parsing grammar in the selected domain pattern will be overwritten with the parsing grammar from the domain pattern template.
  8. Click OK.

To see how this works, do the following:

  1. Create a domain pattern named NameParsing and define parsing grammars for Global Culture, en, and en-US.
  2. Create a domain pattern named NameParsing2 and use NameParsing as a domain pattern template. NameParsing2 is created as an exact copy and contains parsing grammars for Global Culture, en, and en-US.
  3. Modify the culture-specific parsing grammars for NameParsing by changing some of the grammar rules in the Global Culture grammar and add en-CA as a new culture.
  4. Select NameParsing2 on the Domains tab, click Modify, and again use NameParsing as the domain pattern template.

The results will be:

  • The Global Culture parsing grammar will be updated (overwriting your changes if any have been made).
  • The cultures en and en-US will remain the same (unless they have been modified in the target domain, in which case they would then revert back to the Name Parsing version).
  • A culture-specific grammar for en-CA will be added.