File: allow selection of multiple variables to batch-select role

[wvdvegte]

What's your use case?
Some data-file formats have placeholder columns for future variables to be added. For instance, the .FIT file format has dozens of these. You'd want to set them all to the role "skip" when importing the data in Orange. Currently this is only possible by selecting and changing them one by one, which is very time consuming.

What's your proposed solution?
Allow selection of multiple variables, and make it possible to change their role (and preferably also their type) through one single drop-down menu.

Are there any alternative solutions?
No.

[janezd]

I agree that this would be nice, but I start shaking every time that somebody says "selecting and changing multiple somethings somewhere". It is a nightmare to implement, and it also looks weird in terms of the GUI. do you select multiple rows, then click on the type of one of them and get a single combo which then affects the values in all rows?

It also doesn't fit into the existing GUI of the File widget, where a (single) click already opens the combo or starts editing. The only place where clicking doesn't trigger an event is a row number.

Couldn't you use Select Columns for this?

[wvdvegte]

Yes of course, but that would be an extra widget.
Another possibility: I noticed that in the placeholder columns in this kind of files either (a) only have a header but no data (b) have no data and no header. Columns of type (b) are given a header 'Feature [n]' by Orange if they are followed by other columns with a header, and are (fortunately) ignored if they appear after the last column. Would it be a possibility to have an option 'skip all columns with no values' or at least 'skip all columns with no header and no values'?