Custom Table Attribute Usage and Best Practices

I've recently begun using custom table attributes and while I have been experiencing some growing pains I find them quite useful for a number of my use cases. I thought I would create this post to get community input on your experiences, learnings and best practices both for my benefit and the benefit of others who may be wanting to jump into this feature.

My primary use case is as follows: I regularly download several hundred different files a month which need to be distributed across multiple folders and subsequently renamed and further processed. By way of example, file comes into downloads folder is identified from electric company A which is associated with business one and is moved to the business one folder where subsequent processing takes place.

I identify a file and determine where it needs to go either by the file name or by matching contents within the file. I have a rule for my download folder consisting of two criteria a "name matches" and a "contents contain match". I execute the action when "any" condition is met.

The criteria for the conditions is stored in a .CVS file I create and maintain with Numbers. One table contains ~10 rows the other ~20. I chose this approach because it seemed easier to maintain than if I used embedded tables. The tables themselves contain two columns, the first column is the data I am matching for, the second is a description, and is used for my purposes of identifying the specific document and is not used by Hazel. For example column one may contain 68723-5600 which is the zip code I am using to identify the sender which in itself means noting to me. I then use the second column to tell me it is the electric company A.

With that long involved background this seems to be working in general but I do still encounter issues. They seem to be mainly around Hazel not recognizing the input file. I saw one other post on this topic but the user seemed to sort it out himself. I have one particular situation now where the table in one of the conditions is working fine but the other isn't recognized. I tried deleting and recreating the condition, no luck, I double checked that the table was in a .csv format. One point which may be relevant it seems to occur when I attempt to modify the table. This particular table was working when I first created it but when I went in and modified it to change a zip code. It stopped.

Does anyone know if there are restrictions on the characters I can use in the table itself? I've confirmed no commas but I do use other special characters like in the zip code example and AT&T.

Any ideas on best practices I should consider based on the above use case. Anyone have any other interesting use cases they would like to share that I might learn from. Lastly any suggestions on what might be the issue with this one rule

Thanks in advance.

I believe you emailed in to support? In the future, please only email or post to save on duplicate effort. I replied to you there but it does look like there is a stray comma in the excerpt of the file you sent me.