I am working with a document, where each row contains a description for a specific incident (fire incidents, where firefighters turn up and thereafter write a report).
The incidents/reports are written by several different people, so the language varies a lot, which makes it difficult to code for one specific context using one word: is.number(search(substring;text))
Because even if the word is in the text piece, the context is not related to what I am trying to analyse.
I want to broaden my word search to be more flexible, by being able to "put" or "store" several different words/phrases into my "substring" - being able to get closer to the specific context that I wish to analyse.
This way to cover more data that is in fact related, but different in how it is described in the individual incident reports.
I have tried to search for a solution myself, but am unsure on how to phrase this specific inquiry.
So far I have only been able to use the code piece above, which is a bit insufficient, when trying to comb through 2000 rows.
I hope that someone is able to help me!
Thank you
An example:
Store the following words: stopped fire, killed fire, fire was put out into: Killed fire
So that when I use Killed fire all the above wordings are included in my search.
Related
My Question
What are the best practices for creating a customized report based on a user form input? Specifically, how do I create an easy to maintain system which takes user input which is collected in a form and generate multiple paragraphs that explains the results of analysis.
Background
I am working on a very large multiyear project with a startup (who is my client). My job is to program analysis and generate reports to users. The pipeline for data looks like this:
Users enter information into a form -> results are calculated based on user input -> reports are displayed to users that share analysis.
It is really important to my client that some of the analysis results are displayed in paragraphs in a non-formal user friendly tone. The challenge is that the form and analysis are quite complex and will only get more complex over time. An example of the type of template for the paragraphs looks something like this:
resultsParagraphText=`Hi ${userName}. We found that the best ice cream flavour for you is ${bestIceCreamFlavor}. These other flavors ${otherFlavors} might be good for you. Here are the reasons why you might enjoy these flavors: ${reasonsWhyGoodFlavors}.
However we would not recommend these other flavors ${badFlavors}. Here are the reasons you should avoid this bad flavors: ${reasonsWhyBadFlavors}.`
These results paragraphs, of which there of many, have several minor problems which combined are significant:
If there is a bug in the code, minor visual errors would be visible to end users (capitalization errors, missing/extra commas, and so on).
A lot of string comparisons (e.g. if answers.previousFlavors.includes("Vanilla")) are required to generate the results paragraphs. Minor errors in the forms (e.g. vanilla in the form is not capitalized so answers.previousFlavors.includes("Vanilla") returns false even when user enters vanilla.) can cause errors in the results paragraph.
Changes in different parts of the project (form, analysis) directly effect how the results paragraph is made. Bad types, differences in string values, null or undefined values not being caught directly have an impact on how the results paragraph is made.
There are many edge cases (e.g. What if the user has no other suitable good flavors for them? The the sentence These other flavors ${otherFlavors} might be good for you. needs to be excluded).
It is hard to write paragraphs that use templates and have a non-formal tone.
and so on.
I have charts and other types of ways to display results and have explained to the client the challenges of sharing the information in paragraph form.
What I am looking for
I need examples, how tos, best practices on how to build a maintainable system for generating customized paragraphs based on user input. I know how to solve each of the individual issues (as they are fairly simple) but in a large project this will become very hard to maintain.
Notes
I have no clue what tags to use for the post. Feel free to edit/add tags if you know more appropriate ones.
The project is planning to use machine learning in the future other parts of the project. If there is a ML/AI solution that is useful please tell me.
I am working primarily in JavaScript, Python, C, and R, but if there is a library or tool in any other language please tell me. Finding a solution is very important to me and I would be willing to learn a lot find a best solution.
To avoid this question being removed because I have rephrased it to avoid asking for personal opinion, instead asking for existing examples or how tos. I can also imagine that others might find a solution fairly useful. If you can edit it to make the question less subjective please do so.
If you have any questions or need clarification feel free to ask. Any help is appreciated.
I posted this question on Stack Exchange here: (https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/249418/filtering-sharepoint-list-by-another-sharepoint-list), but just realized I should have posted it to Stack Overflow instead. Hope it's not bad form to cross-post (I'll add a link to this post in the other post).
I've been searching the forums and doing research online with no luck- apologies if this has been answered before.
I have a list with several thousand items in it. I often receive bulk update requests where I need to update several hundred of these items at a time (let's say for this example that we're using a field called "Case ID").
Here's what I've tried:
Searching cases individually, or up to three at a time in datasheet view; this is not time effective
Exporting the list and manually manipulating the data in Excel, then pasting in (and writing over) the data in the column that needs to be updated; this approach is not user friendly, is not necessarily time effective, and has potential side effects (causing errors for users currently modifying items that I am changing in bulk)
Lastly- I know I can create custom views that isolate this data; the problem is that the lists of cases I need to modify generally do not have enough commonalities to isolate them using the view filter logic
So- my guess is that I need two lists, likely connected with a web part. The first list would exist solely for the purpose of querying the second list. I would enter the Case IDs I wanted to filter by in the first list, and the second list would filter to show only the Case IDs in the first list. All items would be deleted from the first list between queries.
I'm not married to this approach- it's just my best guess. I'm open to creative and alternative approached, but the final process needs to be user friendly (business partners will be using it).
Does anyone know how I can accomplish this? I've tried to get something implemented several times over the past few years and have never been successful; posting here is my last resort before I throw in the towel.
I have SP 2013, and have SharePoint Designer; please let me know if I need to add any other information.
Thanks in advance for the support,
Chad
I'd suggest to create a JSOM application that will do all updates. It can query only items for update and do item-by-item update.
I have over 6,000 excel sheets. While all the sheets describe the same thing, they are independently formatted. They all have between 9 and 13 columns, but they are out of order, the column names are independently misspelled, and they may or may not have a second, or third, column header.
I am currently trying in python to read cells in a left-down-right-up motion to attempt to locate the same data, but there is physically too many differences in structure names, column ordering, and data definitions to lock them in one a time. Is there a tool that I can use to read these documents and conform them to a single format, via a rapid mapping function?
Thanks much.
Thanks
Wow, it's the Ultimate Data Horror Story.
I want to ask how you ever let it get this way... but I actually don't want to know; I'm already going to have nightmares about this.
It's like that Hoarding show on TV, but with data.
No, I'm afraid that if you can't even identify a pattern then there's no magic function that will be able to either.
But that doesn't mean it's a lost cause. It's just going to need some human interaction, and there are ways to minimize the pain.
What you need is a custom interface that will load the documents one by one, and will walk a human through clicking each relevant column or area, and then automatically load the next document.
There would also need to be buttons for sorting things like obvious garbage sheets (blanks?), "unknowns" (that get put in a folder for advanced research later), and other "unpredictables" may come up during the process.
Also, perhaps once you get into it, you'll notice a pattern you're not thinking of, like maybe *"the person who handled the files from 2002 to 2004 set them up this way"*, or, "when Budget is misspelled, it's always either Bugdet or Budteg".
In this scope, little patterns like that can make a big difference.
Depending on your coding skills, you may or may not need outside assistance with this. I assume this is not data that can just get thrown out, or you wouldn't be asking...
If each document took an average of 20 seconds to process, that would be about 33 hours in total. An hour a day an it's done in a month. Or someone full-time, and it's done in a week.
Do you have a budget you can throw at this? Data archaeology is an actual thing! Hell, I'll do it for you for the right price... (wouldn't break the bank, depending on how urgent it is, of course!)
Either way, this ain't going to be fun for "someone"...
I have a requirement in which I need to import data from excel (CSV) to Dynamics CRM regularly.
Instead of using some simple Data Duplication Rules, I need to implement a point system to determine whether a data is considered duplicate or not.
Let me give an example. For example these are the particular rules for Import:
First Name, exact match, 10 pts
Last Name, exact match, 15 pts
Email, exact match, 20 pts
Mobile Phone, exact match, 5 pts
And then the Threshold value => 19 pts
Now, if a record have First Name and Last Name matched with an old record in the entity, the points will be 25 pts, which is higher than the threshold (19 pts), therefore the data is considered as Duplicate
If, for example, the particular record only have same First Name and Mobile Phone, the points will be 15 pts, which is lower than the threshold and thus considered as Non-Duplicate
What is the best approach to achieve this requirement? Is it possible to utilize the default functionality of Import Data in the MS CRM? Is there any 3rd party Add-on that answer my requirement above?
Thank you for all the help.
Updated
Hi Konrad, thank you for your suggestions, let me elaborate here:
Excel. You could filter out the data using Excel and then, once you've obtained a unique list, import it.
Nice one but I don't think it is really workable in my case, the data will be coming regularly from client in moderate numbers (hundreds to thousands). Typically client won't check about the duplication on the data.
Workflow. Run a process removing any instance calculated as a duplicate.
Workflow is a good idea, however since it is being processed asynchronously, my concern is the user in some cases may already do some update/changes to the data inserted, before the workflow finish working.. therefore creating some data inconsistency or at the very least confusing user experience
Plugin. On every creation of a new record, you'd check if it's to be regarded as duplicate-ish and cancel it's creation (or mark for removal).
I like this approach. So I just import like usual (for example, to contact entity), but I already have a plugin in place that getting triggered every time a record is created, the plugin will check whether the record is duplicat-ish or not and took necessary action.
I haven't been fiddling a lot with duplicate detection but looking at your criteria you might be able to make rules that match those, pretty much three rules to cover your cases, full name match, last name and mobile phone match and email match.
If you want to do the points system I haven't seen any out of the box components that solve this, however CRM Extensions have a product called Import Manager that might have that kind of duplicate detection. They claim to have customized duplicate checking. Might be worth asking them about this.
Otherwise it's custom coding that will solve this problem.
I can think of the following approaches to the task (depending on the number of records, repetitiveness of the import, automatization requirement etc.) they may be all good somehow. Would you care to elaborate on the current conditions?
Excel. You could filter out the data using Excel and then, once you've obtained a unique list, import it.
Plugin. On every creation of a new record, you'd check if it's to be regarded as duplicate-ish and cancel it's creation (or mark for removal).
Workflow. Run a process removing any instance calculated as a duplicate.
You also need to consider the implication of such elimination of data. There's a mathematical issue. Suppose that the uniqueness' radius (i.e. the threshold in this 1D case) is 3. Consider the following set of numbers (it's listed twice, just in different order).
1 3 5 7 -> 1 _ 5 _
3 1 5 7 -> _ 3 _ 7
Are you sure that's the intended result? Under some circumstances, you can even end up with sets of records of different sizes (only depending on the order). I'm a bit curious on why and how the setup came up.
Personally, I'd go with plugin, if the above is OK by you. If you need to make sure that some of the unique-ish elements never get omitted, you'd probably best of applying a test algorithm to a backup of the data. However, that may defeat it's purpose.
In fact, it sounds so interesting that I might create the solution for you (just to show it can be done) and blog about it. What's the dead-line?
The company I work for is in the business of sending press releases. We want to make it possible for interested parties to search for press releases based on a number of criteria, the most important being location. For example, someone might search for all news sent to New York City, Massachusetts, or ZIP code 89134, sent from a governmental institution, under the topic of "traffic". Or whatever.
The problem is, we've sent, literally, hundreds of thousands of press releases. Searching is slow and complex. For example, a press release sent to Queens, NY should show up in the search I mentioned above even though it wasn't specifically sent to New York City, because Queens is a subset of New York City. We may also want to implement "and" and "or" and negation and text search to the query to create complex searches. These searches also have to be fast enough to function as dynamic RSS feeds.
I really don't know anything about search theory, or how it's properly done. The way we are getting by right now is using a data mart to store the locations the releases were sent to in a single table. However, because of the subset thing mentioned above, the data mart is gigantic with millions of rows. And we haven't even implemented cities yet, and there are about 50,000 cities in the United States, which will exponentially increase the size of the data mart by so much I'm afraid it just won't work anymore.
Anyway, I realize this is not a simple question and there won't be a "do this" answer. However, I'm hoping one of you can point me in the right direction where I can learn about how massive searches are done? Because I really know nothing about it. And such a search engine is turning out to be incredibly difficult to make. Thanks! I know there must be a way because if Google can search the entire internet we must be able to search our own database :-)
Google can search the entire internet, and your data via a Google Appliance!