asked on October 15, 2015
We recently changed the data source for one of our reports. Since doing this, a couple of the columns have stopped being processed as columns of string data and are now instead being parsed as columns of numbers, completely messing everything up.
Why is this happening? (In the data source, we have 723 records and the first two records use numbers in these particular columns)
⋅ October 15, 2015
Hello Simon,
Thanks for the question.
Please try to add "+" prefix before that column in the data source file.
Example:
Country, +Year, Sales
US, 2010, 200
More about data types in our documentation - Data types in CSV.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Ian
⋅ October 15, 2015
Hi, Ian
That works, however it isn't a great solution for us, as to prevent this type of bug creeping into future reports it requires us to differentiate between all of our columns of data in all of our datasets, to add these prefixes everywhere. In addition to this, we use these datasets in other tools and modifying all of them to be aware of and strip these prefixes isn't really feasible.
We really need a solution that doesn't require manipulating the dataset. Ideally, it would be great if FlexGrid itself is able to determine the column type based on all value types in the column, rather than just the first record.
I would appreciate your feedback on this matter.
Thanks,
Simon
⋅ October 16, 2015
Simon,
Thanks for the feedback.
Actually, it will be great to see a sample of your data-set.
We need to investigate if it's possible to automatically determine the column type on our side without any additional prefixes.
Regards,
Ian
⋅ October 16, 2015
Simon,
Your sample helped me to better understand your case.
I should say that the only way to get the appropriate result is to use "+" prefix OR set the string value to the first row.
Unfortunately, we are not planning to implement automatic type determination for such cases now, mostly because of the current component architecture.
Regards,
Ian
