Guarantee column order of objects. With headers.

[zevero]

Order is never guaranteed in Objects, so I wonder that it worked for you up until now...

[jczaplew]

It has always worked because v8 is very consistent with Object key ordering, with the exception of integers as keys - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/280713/elements-order-in-a-for-in-loop/280861#280861

I made some edits on a different branch that should guarantee a consistent order. Could you please take a look and let me know if it meets your needs? https://github.com/jczaplew/csv-express/tree/ordered

Thank you for your contribution!

[zevero]

oh ... I did not mean Object key ordering, which is consistent in most browsers and v8 (albeit not in spec). And yes in my code I could have avoided to have both csvHeader_arr and csvHeader_obj if I had chosen to rely on it ;)

My pull request addresses another issue:
My array of object comes from a mongodb and key order is dependent on the order they were saved. Some objects have missing keys, some have more keys.

So if you have a look in my code you can see, that I do not simply take the keys from the first object in the array, but I collect all keys in all of the objects in the order they come and give them a fixed position, which ensures that the same key (values) are in the same column (with correct key in header).

[amadeus-torwell]

+1

I see a critical issue when you have inputs like this:

Works: [{a: 1, b: 2}, {a: 3, b: 4}]

Column 'b' will be missing: [{a: 1}, {a: 3, b: 4}]

So instead of relying on the first object, we would have to create a full table index based on all inputs. What do you think?

[zevero]

This is exactly why I have opened this pull request 2 years ago ... yes I am creating a full table index.

[jczaplew]

@deusama and @zevero - I see the issue, but it seems that creating a full table index could result in a large performance penalty, both in terms of parsing speed and potentially memory usage.

One way this could be addressed is by modifying the package to accept a list of headers, i.e. declaring the object order a priori. It would look something like this:

let headers = ['a', 'b']
let data = [ { 'a': 1}, {'b': 2, 'a': 3} ]

let body = ''
// Loop through the data
for (let i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
  // Iterate on the known headers
  for (let header = 0; header < headers.length; header++) {
    // For each data object, check if it contains the known key
    if (data[i][headers[header]] {
       body += data[i]
    }
  }
}

I'd still like to benchmark this, but it removes the necessity of looping through all of the data twice, once to find all headers and again to parse the data.

Thoughts?

[amadeus-torwell]

Thanks for the quick reply @jczaplew!

Could be done this way, or using a configuration flag having an option for 'first-row-is-head' sort of thing. So the header could be within the data: [{a, b}, {a: 1}, {a: 3, b: 4}]

And a second thought - yes I like the idea of having a configuration here. So we can specify the data we want to see in the csv outputs.

[zevero]

Have a look at my Version of the code https://github.com/zevero/csv-express/blob/b60518d748f2d7df41fcc374c5f29bd308d8089a/lib/csv-express.js

There is no performance penality. As data is parsed there is just a check if the key is known. If not it is simply added.

Of course the header could be predefined. But I would rather not like to bother. For me export-csv should JUST export whatever data there is into csv format. For me, it was just important, that the values, don't end up under the wrong header.

[amadeus-torwell]

Sorry to ask, but do we have progress? :-)

Thanks,
Amadeus