Removing table columns based on a filter using their name

[jan]

Sometimes you may want to delete some column(s) in a data table based on a filter criteria. Perhaps, you want to delete all columns starting with “OLD_”. We can unleash the power of Groovy here. Let’s assume you have some data like this:

We’ve run the task using Run to Line (Ctrl+R) and then opened the Variables view from the Views toolbar. In the Variables view you can see all the variables currently in scope. $lastReturnValue just returns the value of the last step as the name suggest.

The Save Table Reference step saves the data from to a variable called people

Now to explain the formula which does the magic trick:

=people.getHeader().findAll{it.startsWith("OLD_")}.join(",")

What we’re doing here is:

1. Getting the table header using getHeader() method of ORQA table. It returns a list
2. On that list we apply findAll method using a closure as the criteria - this is somewhat difficult to grasp so for further reference here is a post that explains it somewhat Groovy filter criteria on findAll on a list - Stack Overflow. The criteria we’re applying returns all the entries in the list starting with “OLD_”
3. Now we can join the list to get a comma separated list of the columns to remove.

Having stepped over the remove step, we can see the final result with the columns removed.

Removing all but selected columns from data table

Sometimes you want to get rid of all columns in a table but a selected few. This is quite easy in ORQA. Let’s say you have this data: [image] And you only want to keep id, name, dte columns. You can use the Reorder Table Columns operation for this: [image] When we step over the step, you’ll see that only the desired columns are left: [image]