ASCII Data Reader - Load first/last rows

Sergi Fernández

Hello everyone,

It could be useful for developers to have the following functionality implemented in Board:

Add a new setting on the Data Reader "properties" tab that allows developers to specify a certain numer of rows to be loaded, and choosing wether to load the first or last X rows of the file, and ignore the rest of the file.

Usage examples:

• We want to load a cube with 1 or 0 based on if a file contains data or not, to then be able to notify the user on a screen of whether there's data ready to load or not, allowing them to then perform the load of the data. The file can either be empty or contain millions of rows. And for performance purposes, it wouldn't be optimal to process millions of rows just to make a simple emptiness check.

By loading the first 3 rows, for example, we could perform that check in a fast and easy way.

• We have an historical file in which new rows are appended periodically. To keep things simple, we will take as an example a file containing one row for each hour.

By loading only the last 24 rows, we ensure that Board will load the new data since the previous daily load. Allowing us to save time and resources as we can ignore all the previous rows and focus on the ones we need.

Thank you,

Best regards,