Delete/rename features

[alaindebecker]

What's your use case?

I need to change the name of some features and remove some. A frequent question for which I could not find a specialised widget.

My data is a Qty by Date which needed to be grouped by week. Using a Formula I created a week number followed a Group by to get 3 columns: week, Date-Max. value and Qty-Sum. For some reason, I had to revert it to the columns of the original table: Qty, Date.

As I did not found any widget to do this, I used the following workaround:

1) A Formula to create Qty :=Qty-Sum and Date:=Date-Max. value; 2) A Select Columns to remove the three unwanted column.

Two steps (and a lot of reasoning and testing the first time) just to rearrange the column labels.

What's your proposed solution?

I think you could adapt the Formula widget so as to only keep wanted columns.

For example:

• Copying by default all the existing features in the report frame ;
• Each of them with a tick box, to say if they had to apear or not in the output ;
• The current remove button can be deleted, because the logic will become unmanagable with the number of columns.
• And to nicely remain compatible with usage in previous versions, replace the said remove button by a check box labeled "Keep all features" which will be checked by default.

Are there any alternative solutions?

• A totaly new widget.
• Adapting the Select Column widget.
• Implement the functionality on the Formula with a different UI.

Although adpting the Formula (which after all is a widget to specify the features) seems the more intuitive from a user point of view.

[janezd]

We would prefer not to add new widgets for functionality that is easily achieved by others. Orange already has a large number of them, which is - to our experience - scary for many users. Besides, the more widgets we have, the more difficult it is for the user to find the widgets they need. The may even write issues in which they would ask for widgets that already exist. :)

Your suggestion would make the already complex Formula widget even more complicated by adding new tick boxes, while not offering anything that cannot be done with Select Columns (and Edit Domain for renaming columns).