Tables

• Introduction
• Table Design

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Introduction

TSTool provides features to automate processing tabular data and tables are a "first class" data object in TSTool, managed by the processor. Tables have identifiers that are used to retrieve and save tables to the processor.

Table Design

Tables use a custom DataTable utility class in the Table package. This package was originally developed at a time when third-party table packages were lacking and it would require some effort to replace the existing code. Table functionality was originally developed to store spatial data shape attributes and was later enhanced to support reading data from datastores, Excel files, delimited files, etc.

The DataTable code design is fairly simple, consisting of the following:

• List of DataTableField to provide table column metadata
• List of TableRecord to manage table rows
• Other related classes

Data included in tables are expected to extend from the Java Object class and null values are allowed. The table therefore consists of a list of lists (list of TableRecord, which is list of column object values). This design could be optimized but works relatively well. If memory is an issue, the FreeTable command can be used.