MPS Personal file specification
The MPS PERSONAL file will contains name and address of individuals who have registered for the MPS and individuals who are flagged as deceased.
Inclusion Categories - These are being discontinued from the introduction of the Personal registration file. To maintain a consistent number of fields between the Original and Personal file formats fields 3 and 4 will remain in the file but have blank entries.
The X (deceased) records have always been registered at personal level but by Initial or Initials only rather than full forename. The recent MPS changes do not affect deceased records so these will retain initials only in the Forename field.
For licensees converting from the Original format, please be aware of the increase in length for most of the fields.
There are two data file formats - Fixed format and Ascii Comma Delimited.
The file layouts are illustrated below.
| Position | Length | Content |
| 1 | 1 | P = remove this person from your mailings X = deceased person, remove this record from your mailing list |
| 2 - 9 | 8 | Date of request DDMMCCYY |
| 10 - 17 | 8 | Inclusions - BLANK. (See notes on Inclusion Categories above) |
| 18 - 25 | 8 | Future inclusion categories - BLANK |
| 26 - 45 | 20 | Prefix |
| 46 - 95 | 50 | Forename |
| 96 - 145 | 50 | Surname |
| 146 - 155 | 10 | Suffix |
| 156 - 205 | 50 | Address Line 1 |
| 206 - 255 | 50 | Address Line 2 |
| 256 - 305 | 50 | Address Line 3 |
| 306 - 355 | 50 | Town |
| 356 - 405 | 50 | County |
| 406 - 413 | 8 | Postcode |
| 414 - 415 | 2 | DPS (Delivery Point Suffix) |
The above record format pertains to the Fixed format data file. The Ascii comma separated format will follow the sequence above with the maximum length indicated by the 'Length' column. The individual fields will be 'text qualified' with a double quote character (").