Extractions

Overview

The intention is to provide recipients of TARIC3 data with a complete picture of the TARIC3 database. After the Commission has delivered the TARIC3 “start-up” file to Member States, all subsequent updates will be transmitted on a regular basis via the TARIC3 output bridge. This start-up file, along with the regular updates, will provide a complete record of the state of the data held in the TARIC3 database. The data transmitted to Member States will conform as closely as possible to the data held by the Commission on the TARIC3 database, and for this reason DG TAXUD will utilise the TARIC3 operational database log tables, which hold a full audit trail of all database activity.

There will be no record conversion in the TARIC3 interface.

All updates made to the database since the last extraction will be transmitted. This will include, for example, errors made in data capture. Thus it will be possible for Member States to receive an insert, a modification and a delete of the same record in the same transmission.

Complete records

As and when amendments are made to the TARIC3 database, extractions of complete amended records will be transmitted via the output bridge.

Null values

Where NULL values can appear in the TARIC3 database, these fixed length fields will be transmitted to Member States as “spaces”. In the Records Section of this document these fields have been specified by means of the symbol “°” (ie degree) in the column headed “attributes”. Long description fields are handled differently - see the paragraph on Long descriptions.

Long descriptions

Where a long description forms part of a record specification, it is always placed as the last field in the record. In order to optimise data transmission times, only the number of characters contained in this field will be transmitted to Member States (i.e. trailing null characters will be suppressed, and ending with a quote). This means that the following record types will be transmitted as variable length records:

  • 01000 TRANSMISSION COMMENT

  • 20010 FOOTNOTE DESCRIPTION

  • 24505 ADDITIONAL CODE DESCRIPTION

  • 40015 GOODS NOMENCLATURE DESCRIPTION

  • 41010 EXPORT REFUND NOMENCLATURE DESCRIPTION

The data-type of a long description field is ‘LONG’; this is the type used in the record specification to allow the maximum record length to be calculated for each record type. However, in practice, since a large percentage of long descriptions in the database will be much shorter than this maximum, transmitting variable length records will reduce the size of the transmission files and hence the transmission times.

If the long description is empty, then nothing will be transmitted for that field.

Special characters in descriptions

Certain control characters which may be data captured in the database short or long description fields could cause problems for data processing. These will be trapped by the extraction program and converted to mark-up. Since the migration of TARIC to the Unicode character set, only the line feed character (decimal 010) causes problems and is therefore replaced by the tag <P> in the extraction file.