Pipe character in text values not escaped, affects filtering

Sam shared this question 2 years ago
Answered

I have a variable that readers can filter by that contains values like "City Administrator", "Sustainability" and a few combinations separated by a pipe like "City Administrator|Sustainability." I expect that latter combination to show up as its own value, because it's a unique text group for that field. But the "|" character is not getting escaped so those records appear when "City Administrator" or "Sustainability" are selected.

The pictures here should help clarify. Note the one record that is "City Administrator|Sustainability" showing up in the tables, but with an empty value for training group.

"City Administrator"

/15eb4284f8544c497765c5420244fa15

"City Administrator|Sustainability"

Here the value is double-counted.

/c6c1761f88ba678c39da7567a91b89b6

"Sustainability"

/d421e4a4ad81c1d35a34549bcfc9c955


Ideally the filtering would not apply any regex to my text values and could just display "City Administrator|Sustainability" as its own combination. If the software wanted to interpret the | as both, then it should not be appearing on its own blank row in the table, and should not be counted twice in the second table.

I will work around this by changing the | character to a dash during data ETL but wanted to report this bug.

Replies (5)

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Hello Sam,

Thank you for submitting this. I'm working on getting replication steps together and will get this over to the product team for a fix. I will keep you posted on progress.

Thank you for letting us know!

David

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Hello Sam,

There is a bug fix request in place with the product team. We will keep you posted with updates as we have them.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.

David

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Hello Sam,

I wanted to follow up with you on this. Our product team has evaluated this request and determined that this is not something that they can move forward with.

Here is what they had to say.

"Storing data with pipes is fraught with danger as many software products and databases do not handle these well.

Yellowfin does not support the use of filter values that contain pipes as we internally store values this way.

The client can work around this, for example by altering the storage of this data to use characters other than pipe."

Please let me know if you have any more questions about this.

Regards,

David

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Hi David,

Good to know, I will use the workaround they recommend. Thanks for closing the loop on this.

Sam

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Hi Sam,

No problem. Please let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.

Have a great day,

David

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