Generating an attribute if it does not already exist

PaulM

Either my searching skills are deficient or there isn't an obvious way of doing this... 

I am pivoting data which may not or may not generate the attributes I need depending on each example's actual data. This means that I get varying sets of attributes from the operator which is causing havoc later on in the process. I want to generate any missing attributes but I can't find an easy way to do this. 

In theory I was just going to add a Generate Attributes operator and create each one conditionally on whether it already exists. But how do I test for the existence of an attribute?

Many thanks!

kayman

The branch operator allows you to check if an attribute exists or not, but if you have like a lot of them this can become pretty annoying. So in practice we also have a collection of dummy sets (but without actual records) and use the Append Superset operator. 

MartinLiebig

Hi @PaulM,

so you have a list of all attributes which could possible exist?

BR,

Martin

PaulM

Hi @mschmitz,

Yes I do. I just came up with what felt like a very hacky way of doing this by creating an exampleset with a single example including all the attributes defaulted to zero plus a static id which I then do a join on to the master example such that any attributes in the master example are retained. 

Feels hacky but does seem to work If there's a neater solution would love to hear it!

Thanks,
Paul

MartinLiebig

Ha, thats round about what i had in mind.

kayman

The branch operator allows you to check if an attribute exists or not, but if you have like a lot of them this can become pretty annoying. So in practice we also have a collection of dummy sets (but without actual records) and use the Append Superset operator.