biolab
Move Multifile widget from Spectroscopy add-on to Data category in "regular" Orange
What's your use case? The Multifile widget can be very useful in applications other than spectroscopy. It should therefore not be hidden in the add-on. For instance, I can download data from my smart energy meter to monthly files. Multifile allows me to put them all in one file and investigate my energy use over longer time.
What's your proposed solution? Include Multifile in the standard Orange installation and put it in the Data category of widgets.
Are there any alternative solutions? Yes: install the Spectroscopy add-on, which brings several other widgets not needed by people not working on spectroscopy. Besides, people may be unaware that the widget exists at all. I found out about it with a Google search for orange merge files from folder
I support the idea, but I am not overly happy with having more than one File widget. It reminds me of Weka (or is it Knime?). Currently we have two.
This is a duplicate of https://github.com/biolab/orange3/issues/4706. Discussing it, we decided that the existing File (CSV?) widget should allow choosing multiple files and merge them (horizontally). If columns in those file mismatch -- either use all (with nans where the column is missing) or simply report an error.
Complication: the class that keeps recently opened files does not support multiple files.
I'm leaving this issue open for now so that we can continue discussion. Afterwards, let's close this and keep #4706.
Just to reinforce my opinion (also in #4706) I think it would be great to have only one File widget that takes care of various ways of getting data from the disk.
We could add another radio button "Multiple Files" to the file widget. When it's selected, the current info box would be replaced by list view with files.
I think that would be nice but then you need to handle the file list later too, so the "File" widget would need some reworking to show them and allow for (some of) the functionalities we have in Multifile. Not sure about technicalities here...
Another suggestion: while you're at it, consider the option to interpret the filename (preferably without the full path) as categorical variable (label). Currently, Multifile includes the filename with path as meta.