Can Strings be used in immerse reports?

#1

Now I completely understand that String types don’t lend themselves to most aggregation or comparison operations. However, they are an important data type.

I’d like to propose that strings should be allowed in the Table chart type. I have sentences with very important context that need to be reviewed. MAPD helps me find the needles in the haystack and the team is loving it. The big problem is that after the filtering and toying and manipulating…they need to be able to read and probably export the super critical contextual data which is stored as a String.

Thank you

#2

Hi @davidrubert -

Strings are allowed in the Table type as dimensions. As you say, aggregating strings isn’t a mathematical operation, so they are not allowed in the metrics section.

Best,
Randy

#3

I’m on version 4.4.1 and my string fields are not options for adding a dimension. Perhaps is a bug?

#4

Hi @davidrubert,
you can use text fields as a dimension in Immerse, but only the encoded dictionary ones.

so if you want to use a text as a dimension you have to specify the desired encoding when you create the table

create table sometable
( sometext   text encoding dict(32), -- if the number of distinct values is over 65k
  sometext2 text encoding dict(16), -- if the number of distinct values is over 256 and less tha 65k
  sometext3 text encoding dict(8)    -- if the number of distinct values is less than 256
)

the numbers are the number of bits the encoding is using so every row will use 4 bytes for the first field, 2 bytes for the second and so on.

A little trick: If you a detail’s table, don’t specify any dimension and place the fields you want to display as a detail into the measure section