For some countries print objects like postal barcodes and indicia require specific contents which is defined by the postal authorities. Examples are the IMB-barcode of USPS, the barcodes of Royal Mail and PostNL, the Premium Address indicia of German post and the Datamatrix codes for Swiss Post.
In some cases you will have the contents already in the database or file that you have linked, but in other cases you might only have parts of it in seperate fields in the database or parts of the contents are not in the database at all. In those cases you can use Postal datasources to generate the contents needed.
Postal datasources are country specific and when you create one, will help you in defining contents and formats that conform to the offical requirements.
You define, modify, or delete a postal field, by clicking Postal in the Functions group on the Datasources tab. In the menu that appears you can select an existing Postal field or select New.
The Postal Field window will open where you can review or specify the settings for the postal datasource and give the field a name.
You then select the Country and Type of contens you want to generate.
In the Options group you define the contents by selecting and entering the settings for all elements of the field. In most cases, there will be an explanation of the element or setting displayed at the bottom of the list.
You can preview the results of your settings in the Preview group. By using the arrows you can step through the values.
TIP: Some postal datasources require unique numbers for each mail piece. You can generate these numbers using a counter datasource (see Defining a counter).