Importing Designation Lists
Articles > Designations
July 12, 2023 at 9:58:02 PM
Designation Lists can be imported two ways, text file and OnCue XMLs from other cases.
Text Files can be a very quick way to load a lot of designations all at once. The format is not complex, and it does not necessarily have to be precise to be successful. Any text editor can be used to create the file, but it does need to have some basic information and must be saved as a *.txt file (comma delimited, tab delimited, plain text.)
To create the import you must have headers in your text file. Media ID, Transcript ID, a Transcript Highlighter Color Number. All headers must be contained in brackets [].
Import file sample.
The first header with “ID=” indicates the line contains the Media ID and/or Name. The first space separates the Media ID and name.
So the first header looks like this - [ID=V1 Bart Defense Affirmatives]
In OnCue it ends up like this.
The second header line contains the Transcript ID. When you look at the Transcripts tab in OnCue that is the ID/Name - [Transcript=Jain, David 2011-12-19]
You can copy this information from the Transcript tab by clicking on your transcript and at the bottom of the screen expand the arrow.
The final header identifies the highlighter color to be used for the designations directly below it. “HL=” should be followed by the number or the title of the desired color (see Explaining Transcript Highlighters for a more details). If no color is chosen, the default is 1.
[hl=2] or [hl=Defense Affirmatives]
Following the header, begin listing each designation, with one designation on each line. We realized that you rarely get clean files so we wanted to minimize the issues as much as possible. Import text files can be tab delimited, comma delimited, space delimited, colons and dashes and even look like the list below. OnCue ignores the extra stuff and focuses on numbers. Single page lines are okay and OnCue recognizes when there is a page followed by two different line numbers.
You can do a single import file with multiple deposition sources or multiple colors. OnCue reads the information from the headers from top to bottom.
What's even better, you can do multiple designation lists in one file.
To import lists, hover over the + on the Designations Tab.
There is a very important option for importing.
"Perform update if record already exists" has a very specific purpose designed to cut your workload down after you have tuned designations, then receive a new list of edited designations without an indication of what has changed. If you import this new list with the same ID as what you have tuned in the database, selecting the update option will do two things.
Update your existing Designation List with the new designations from the text file.
Retain any tuning or document linking you had on your list before you updated the designations.
To clarify that, if you import a designation list with the same ID as one already in, you will have the new designations, and any previous tuning that can be applied to the new list will be retained. So, after you update a Designation List with new page/lines from an import file, you will end up with a list that looks like this:
You can also import XML files that have been exported from a different OnCue database by selecting "XML" instead of "Text". If the XML file also contains the transcript(s), those will also be imported and populate the Transcripts tab. Using the XML retains text edits and tuning information and OVERWRITES any existing list. See Exporting to Text/XML above for more explanation on XML files.
Can I import tuned lists or import all of my designations at once?
Designation Lists are the page/line clips of the deposition testimony for the purpose of playback in court. You will need a synchronized transcript file (.mdb or an OnCue xml) and the raw deposition video to use this feature (see Adding Synchronized Transcripts).
Designation Lists can be exported to either video file or text file and can be imported by text file or by OnCue xml file from other cases.
Step-by-step Instructions