Dynamically update Datatypes

[kamels]

Hi, 

Is there a way when new columns come into my workflow, they can automatically update to be a fixed decimal or any type of number field? They are currently coming in as V_String and I was hoping that this would be something I wouldn't have to do manually. 

[apathetichell]

@CoG --- you are correct. I was incorrect in the earlier statement. thanks for pointing that out. I would posit though that this is not what the auto field was tool was built to do --- and it was built to dump excess space in string fields because the difference between a vw_string default size and the max size in the field can be huge and this really hits performance in large datasets.

[dreldrel]

You could consider using multiple field to pre-process your data then use auto field to update the data type

[kamels]

This is the data that I am looking at. The Auto-Field will not work to correct this to a numeric value in order to create formulas. 

[Diederik_vanderharst]

@kamels I'm not surprized because it looks like the top two records contain text.

The autofield will look at what is most efficient, but also what is possible. A field that contains as little as one text char will never become a numerical field. So either you clean up the data so you are left string fields that only contain numbers before transforming them to numerical. Or you have to calculate within string fields transforming every value to number before in row eg. tonumber([field1]) / tonumber([field2])