codeforIATI / iati-datastore

An open-source datastore for IATI data with RESTful web API providing XML, JSON, CSV plus ETL tools
https://datastore.codeforiati.org
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Tweak data returned for user convienience #344

Open matmaxgeds opened 2 years ago

matmaxgeds commented 2 years ago

Problem

Some IATI data is inconvenient for less technical data users e.g. many fields from the publisher aiddata have whitespace around the content which makes a mess of the excel export

Describe the solution you’d like

DS Classic could fix some of these issues and make them available with an additional part of the query e.g. "&clean" to indicate that this is a cleaned set, not the data as originally published.

DS classic would need to keep a clear list of changes/cleaning they have applied for users to see - maybe even include a link in the downloadable outputs/CfI namespace when the &clean switch is used

'clean' could also be added to the bugtracker to indicate where a bug could be fixed by cleaning.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

Users could do this cleaning themselves - but is inefficient as everyone has to repeat the same work, also had for users to know what to clean (and that they will need to clean) in advance, plus many will not have the technical skills - which was the point of e.g. giving xlsx output.

Additional context

Here is an example of aiddata columns needing a trim for whitespace image