minor bug part 2 about sheetrock

[chriszarate]

Sometimes Google Spreadsheets automatically withholds the header row (usually when the user has employed "View > Freeze rows...") and sometimes it doesn't. The trouble is that it doesn't pass any reliable indicator of whether this is the case. It's hard to tell the difference between data and column labels.

I've made an option available (actually I repurposed one that wasn't doing much of anything) to address this issue. By default, Sheetrock will treat the first returned row as the header row. Alternatively, you can tell it to treat the column labels as the header row. Do this using the "header" option:

var myOptions = { url: [...], header: true };
$('#statistics').sheetrock(myOptions);

I've updated the JSFiddle to use this new option.
http://jsfiddle.net/DymcL/1/

[bealtine]

Well that's what I thought that option did..."do we have a header"

[bealtine]

You must think I'm a nutjob:)

Anyway now the original spreadsheet (eg the test one) doesn't display header info only column titles like A B C etc

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag1L9aBNT9eNdEJoOF9vQks4SUxKVHlOOUk3VjVVQWc#gid=0

I've made it public for now

[chriszarate]

No, I really appreciate the testing you are doing. I haven't been able to test it on a wide variety of spreadsheets so this is really, really useful. I'll take a look at this soon.

[chriszarate]

I took a look. It's working correctly, you just have to adjust the header option accordingly:

http://jsfiddle.net/DymcL/2/

What I was trying to say above is that Sheetrock is unable to automatically figure out whether Google Spreadsheets has identified a header row. So it's up to you to test and supply a header option if necessary.

Here's what I'd suggest. First try it without the header option (the default is false). If you find that the header row is omitted, supply a header of true. Does that make sense?

[chriszarate]

Here's an updated JSFiddle that might help explain things better:

http://jsfiddle.net/DymcL/3/

[bealtine]

:)

Ja makes sense (sort of) however I've edited the fiddle to demo what I mean.
So I need to identify if the ss has a header row and as you say turn on/off the header option?

That's a bit annoying but not a major headache...
I'll look into it later myself as I'm busy on other stuff right now:(

[bealtine]

My view would be if header is on then row 1 wouldl be the header? that would suit me:)

[bealtine]

OK here's my idea for what it's worth:
The header option tells the module to treat x numbers of lines as the header with zero as the default, so if header : 2 then the first 2 lines are the header lines, if it is zero then the column names (A/B/C etc) are the column titles...

What do you think?

[chriszarate]

That's a good approach and I've implemented it (but we're back to using headers instead of header). The only caveat is that if Google has identified a row as a header row and uses it for the column labels, you can't override it with headers: 0.

I think it works well and is reasonably intuitive. Let me know what you think.

http://jsfiddle.net/DymcL/5/

[bealtine]

yeah just tried it out seems to be ok, One table outputs the column names and the other A/B/C etc. I think it's a reasonable compromise myself...now on with what I really want to do:)
Not sure how google identifies a row as a header though...

[chriszarate]

I believe it's triggered by "View > Freeze rows...". At least that's the correlation I've seen.

Thanks for the suggestion.