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dmnfarrell / pandastable

Table analysis in Tkinter using pandas DataFrames.
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Unexpected column title causes problems in filters #107

Open rpgoldman opened 5 years ago

rpgoldman commented 5 years ago

I have a pandas data table that is full of flow cytometry data -- this is data from a piece of cell biology measurement equipment. It has columns with different optical channels for each unit. The optical channels' names are all of this pattern 'XXX-Y', for example 'BL1-A'. This causes problems with the query processing, because of two things:

  1. the query interpreter misinterprets BL1-A as BL1 minus A
  2. there is no feedback to the user to indicate a problem. I see the following in the shell (I started running DataExplore as python3 -m pandastable/main.py): 
    pandas.core.computation.ops.UndefinedVariableError: name 'BL1' is not defined

    but if you are not looking at a terminal window, you won't see this.

I can enter this using the widgets, so I guess that's the work-around. But it would be nice to see the errors in interpreting the string. If I can figure it out, I'll try to make a PR for this.

dmnfarrell commented 5 years ago

Yes I just ignore the errors and throw them away which obviously is not that helpful. It would just mean printing the errors in the terminal. I don't think columns with such symbols can be interpreted. You could convert your column names using the tool in dataexplore to replace the -.

rpgoldman commented 5 years ago

Would it be possible to throw the errors into a pop-up menu? I've never used tkinter, but I have used Tcl+Tk, so if you could point me at code that pops up a modal dialog box, I will submit a merge request that makes these errors visible to the programmer.

dmnfarrell commented 5 years ago

Well for non programmers it could be annoying if a popup appears with every error. I was thinking it might be better to send the stack traces to a log using the logging module: https://realpython.com/python-logging/ Do you have an experience with that?

rpgoldman commented 5 years ago

No, I'm afraid I have never tried. Note, though, that the string command, which is where this error arises, is not likely to be used by any but programmers, so a pop up might not be so bad. A logger makes sense, though. I just haven't used one. By the way, I have a tweaked version where I inserted an optional debugger from StackExchange that lets me throw into the debugger when I want to. I'll see about sharing that, if you are interested.

dmnfarrell commented 5 years ago

Sure you can show me how you do that. It could be best to create a debug mode that you activate and then it creates the popups but it might be a bit too ad hoc. I would prefer something simple to implement. I will look into the logging. It's something I would have done long ago if I had time.

rpgoldman commented 5 years ago

See #110. Note that this is not ready for merge -- it's just a starting point. But it might be helpful for you, as well as me.