request: encoding/excel basic extract #2141
Unanswered
kghenderson
asked this question in
Ideas
Replies: 0 comments
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
-
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Client side validation is a highly in demand request. This isn't an outstanding bug, but would would provide immediate useful value and get cue in the hands of many users. This is, imho, very high value, even in its very simplest form.
Describe the solution you'd like
Initially, simply reads from excel into cue would suffice. I think that constraints are perfectly fine, in that it doesn't need to be universal or too fancy, although of course there are opportunities to expand down the line. If this makes the feature list, I'm happy to expand these ideas further and provide some simple sample files and use cases.
A very first case would be to treat the returned data like encoding/csv and just return a list of lists and leave it to the developer to pick through. Given a filename, a worksheet (tab), extract the values which we can retrieve in a tool and convert to cue/json/etc.
A better, secondary option would include: have cue read from an excel file, then the option to specify a column header row and a row header column, e.g. Row 5 has the column headers and Column C has the row headers. These would then be pulled into a nested map with: dataRange: { "(RowHeader)": "(ColumnHeader)": Value }. This data range can be typed and validated in cue's ordinary ways to do checking from this extraction.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Excel-based options: Users can open excel -> save as -> csv, but this is very awkward in excel and brings them to a new document which they then have to close and reopen the original. Alternatively VBA can be used there to perform validations or an extract, but that requires a special xlsm macro-enabled workbook which have security restrictions and not desirable. Or an excel plugin can be developed but that also presents other issues.
External tools: developers could use python or an external cli tool to perform this extraction as a first step, then import that file using cue. but now we have compounded complexity. they need that other tool installed (and sometimes that's hard to get through corporate IT), there's multiple things that can break.
Additional context
This relates to another feature request for expanded csv options since the excel csv export isn't currently cue/go friendly because of its inconsistent use of quotes.
We want cue to be corporate, business user desktop friendly and not to have to rely on external tools. These users aren't developers and almost never have admin rights and binary tools are rightfully treated with caution. Cue proper (the core libraries) needs to be trusted and so being able to work with excel, the #1 business tool, and honestly - probably the #1 cause of data pipeline issues, to me seems to be a truly core component.
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions