CSV Array Format

[ngageoint]

CSV Array Format

[dclemenzi]

Not a great solution but for now to get us pass this issue we decided to implement a fix in our post processing when converting the feature into a rowset.

    @Override
    public Object[] next()
    {
        Feature feature = featureIterator.next();

        Object[] row = new Object[properties.size()];

        for (int i = 0; i < properties.size(); i++)
        {
            Object value = feature.getProperty(properties.get(i)).getValue();

            if (value instanceof ArrayList)
            {
                value = StringUtils.join((ArrayList) value, ",");
            }
            else if (value instanceof String && ((String) value).startsWith("[") && ((String) value).endsWith("]"))
            {
                value = StringUtils.join(new JSONArray((String) value).iterator(), ",");
            }

            row[i] = value;
        }

        return row;
    }

One thing to point out when we disable the CSV all of or numeric arrays come back as ArrayList but our String arrays come back as String. Which is why we needed to add the 'else if' portion. Maybe this is a result of how we are indexing the data within ElasticSearch?

[sjudeng]

Yeah array handling for CSV/GML output has gone through a few iterations in the plugin and the current implementation is still not ideal. Originally array encoding was implemented as a string-join but that caused errors for numeric arrays when outputting GML (and maybe CSV), as I think you've encountered. Let me know if you think you have an approach that would make more sense on the plugin-side for this.

The default (non-CSV) encoding will return the actual array and is suitable for GeoJSON output if you can consume that. This could also be used in the case where you're programmatically accessing features as you'll get the property back as an array directly.

[dclemenzi]

Yeah the non-CSV encoding is actually preferred. We need CSV for now so our code is consistent when switching between databases. At some point we should probably make the switch. The change on our side is sufficient to get our ITs passing.