When using the combination of Selector and Linker to pre-merge the music and traffic content and not making a distinction between the two record types, the output .ASC file looks similar to the example fragment shown.

In this example, the double-ampersand (&&) is used as the fixed-character prefix for both music and traffic records in their respective print format setup.  As Linker places the various bits of traffic log record information in different positions within the output file as a default, handling both record types the same way produces a finished traffic log similar to the example fragment shown below.

While a log with content like the example generally works OK, particularly if LogMerge is using a DCS, Maestro or XStudio inventory file during the merge process, you can see from the example that there is extraneous information in some fields and the traffic item descriptions have leading spaces and in some cases are truncated (incomplete).

The description part of the record can be cleaned up a bit if the option "Keep log descriptions from source logs" in unchecked and an inventory file is used. In this case, LogMerge would do a lookup of each cart number in the inventory file and use the description from the inventory rather than what came from the original source log(s). The technique will not clear up the extraneous characters in the Type and Customer Number fields, though.

In LogMerge versions 5.3S and above, you can use a different technique by changing the traffic print format to use the characters "^^" (double-caret, line positions 1 & 2).  Then, LogMerge will handle the two record types differently, for the most part eliminating the leading spaces and extraneous characters issues.

 

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