Merge: all field names are restricted to dBase. Way too strict in general.

[GoogleCodeExporter]

In GeoDa 1.5.26 (compiled with all changes as of Feb 19):

1) Open a SQLite project
2) Attempt to Merge a CSV file that contains the following:
 names longer than 10 characters, and mixed case names.  For example "Geographic Code"
3) First issue: All names from CSV file have been converted to all caps. For 
example "GEOGRAPHIC CODE".  This is an unacceptable since neither SQLite, nor 
CSV has this field restriction and this will result in ugly field names for the 
end user.

4) Second issue: Merge complains that "Geographic Code" is more than 10 
characters long and contains illegal characters such as spaces and will not 
proceed until user enters a new name!  This is a huge problem when every single 
field name is longer than 10 characters.

5) The very strict dBase field name restriction should only apply when merging 
into a dBase/Shapefile project.

6) It might be acceptable to not allow spaces and other such characters in 
general, but restricting all names to 10 characters and converting everything 
to all caps makes Merge a generally not-useful feature for non-dBase 
datasources.

7) It would be useful to at least make some sort of tool to auto-create 
acceptable field names (again, depending somewhat on the the particular 
datasource).  For example, many DBs might not allow spaces in field names and 
we could offer to substitute all spaces with '_' characters.  This would be 
nice, but at least we need to not restrict things to dBase so severely (10 
chars and all caps!) for 1.6.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by mmcc...@gmail.com on 19 Feb 2014 at 12:55

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Yes, the basic logic is still from previous GeoDa dbase format, so it requires 
"10 chars and all caps". But, I think we can put the restrictions in somewhere 
for different Datasource to solve this "10 chars and all caps" issue.

Best Regards!
Xun

Original comment by lixun...@gmail.com on 19 Feb 2014 at 5:08

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Fixed in ci 3074. 

Original comment by lixun...@gmail.com on 26 Feb 2014 at 12:09

• Changed state: Fixed