Row List Concept
A row list is a named subset of all rows. Row lists may be used for various purposes, e.g. within a list filter to hide all rows that don't belong to the list. In graphical views list members may be shown with larger or differently shaped markers or in a different color. Graphical views may put the emphasis on list members by displaying all other rows in a grayish tone in the background. Or labels may be shown for list members only. Row lists may be used to permanently store a current selection. Or a row list may define a data subset for a data analysis method.
Once defined, row lists are automatically saved within native
DataWarrior files.
The menu contains functionality to create, manipulate, and delete
row lists. You may add or remove individual or selected rows to or from a
row list. For instance, you may create a few row lists
from different sets of selected rows and afterwards add more rows to some of those lists with the
item from the popup menu that opens with a right mouse click on any view.
This way you may manually assign rows to self defined categories. Alternatively, you may select multiple rows and
and add them all to a list at once by choosing from the menu.
Creating Row Lists
The menu's submenu offeres various
tasks of how to create a new row list. All of these tasks have in common that they
open a dialog, which asks for a list name and other options that depend on the particular menu item:
| kind | |
| 1 | a |
| 2 | b |
| 3 | a |
Dialog settings for new list of distinct rows sharing the same target name and organism.
This option can be selected for any of tasks. If this option is selected, then a category column must be chosen. The initially created row list will then be post-processed in two steps. First all of its rows are processed to extract all categories represented by the row list. In a second step those rows that are not yet list members, are added to the list, if they belong to any of the previously extracted categories.
Row Selections and Row Lists
Creating a new list from a selection basically saves a selection for later re-use under a given name. There a multiple ways to interact between a current selection and a chosen list: With and one may add or remove all currently selected rows to/from any existing row list. One may also work in the opposite direction, which is adding or removing those rows to/from the current row selection, which are member of a given row list ( and ).
Sometimes list management means to very frequently add and remove rows to and from a list, which can become a tedious task when always done with mouse in the list menu. Therefore, two keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-1 and Ctrl-0 can be used to add or remove the currently selected row(s) to/from a Default List. If that list doesn't exist and Ctrl-1 is pressed, then a list with this name is automatically created.
Column Content and Row Lists
An alternative way to create a set of row lists can be achieved with from the menu. This task creates one list for every category being present in a given column and assigns table rows accordingly. The list's names are built from the category name and an optional prefix and postfix.
The inverse process can be triggered by choosing , which creates a new column and translates the list membership of every row into a cell entry composed of all list names, the row is member of.
Exporting and Importing Row Lists
Row lists can be exported into a text file. In order to later identify individual entries, an identifier column must be chosen prior to the export. DataWarrior writes the name of the identifier column into the new row list file. Then it creates a list of all distinct identifiers of all list members taken from the identifier column. This identifier list is then also written into the export file.
Analogously, when importing a list file DataWarrior asks for a key column that contains the identifiers, which are then matched against the identifiers from the list file in order to assign list members.
Dialogs for row list export and import.
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