In the same way a fingerprint is used to identify a person, the fingerprint is a way to identify a field by its characteristics. The base concept is that different kinds of fields have different types of content and therefore have different fingerprints.
The fingerprint is calculated by the Sampling function, which displays concisely the content of the data store data elements or a sample of the values contained in the fields with the number of occurrences for each of them.
After having calculated the fingerprint, if you know that the corresponding data element belongs to a specific class of data element (for example, customer code), you can use the fingerprint of this data element as a prototype, and assign it to this class.
The next step is to search all the data elements that have a fingerprint similar to the prototype assigned to the class with the job Class Data Element Assignment (see the chapter Class Data Element Assignment Job in the Front End Guide). This job suggests a class that is assigned a level of confidence calculated using recognition algorithms based on the compatibility of definition attributes and similarity of contents.
After job execution, the suggested class can be confirmed (see the section Estimated ClassesConfirm Tab in the chapter Work with Data Elements in the Front End Guide.)