Crate clipivot

clipivot is a command-line tool for quickly creating pivot tables.

If you want to use the program, visit the Github repo for installation and usage instructions. If, on the other hand, you want to contribute to clipivot’s development, read on.

In particular, I strongly advise you to read the brief bit at the top of the page for the aggregation module. That bit should show you how clipivot is structured, so you can more knowledgeably explore the tool.

How to help

Regardless of your programming experience, you can help make clipivot a better tool.

Requires programming experience

• Performance: I’ve tried to design clipivot to be reasonably performant, but I’m sure there are places where performance could be optimized. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. (Note: I’m aware that there are technically faster algorithms for computing median than the one I wound up with, the BTreeMap in Rust’s standard library. The reason I chose the BTreeMap is that it is well-suited for adding items from a stream and it is more memory efficient than other algorithms I’m aware of. But let me know if you’re aware of a way to improve the speed of the median computation while maintaining the best case memory efficiency of BTreeMap.)
• Coding style: This is my first project in Rust, so I’m sure there are parts of the code that are not idiomatic in Rust or that are poorly structured.
• Testing: I think I’ve included fairly decent testing for this tool, but I’m sure there are places where my testing can improve.

Doesn’t require programming experience

• Bugs: If something in this program doesn’t work like you think it’s supposed to, please let me know.
• Error handling: I’ve tried to make error handling as clear and helpful as possible, so if an error message you get from clipivot confuses you, let me know and I’ll do what I can to fix it.

In particular, pretty much nothing you run should ever result in what Rust calls a “panic” — basically an unanticipated, fast exit from a program. Panics look something like:

thread 'main' panicked at 'explicit_panic', src/main.rs:5:1
note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace

• Documentation: You shouldn’t be confused about how to get clipivot to work. If you’ve read the guide on GitHub and the help message and are confused by part of it, please let me know.

• Features: I don’t have any new features in mind for clipivot, but if you do, let me know and I’ll consider whether or not I think it makes sense to add the feature.

Development Environment

In order to contribute code, first clone the repository to install the source code:

$ git clone https://github.com/maxblee/clipivot

Then, make changes to the code and/or add/change tests, and then run

$ cargo test

to run tests.

Formatting

In addition, I use clippy to lint code and rustfmt to automatically format code.

To install them, type

$ rustup update
$ rustup component add rustfmt --toolchain stable
$ rustup component add clippy --toolchain stable

And from there, you can run rustfmt with

$ cargo fmt --all

and clippy with

$ cargo clippy -- -A clippy::ptr_arg

Note that I am ignoring the clippy::ptr_arg warning, which raises a warning when you put a &Vec<T> into a function call.

Contact me

To get in touch with me about clipivot, send me an email at maxbmhlee@gmail.com or submit an issue on the GitHub page.

Modules

aggfunc

The aggfunc module is the central module for computing statistics from a stream of records.

aggregation

The module that actually aggregates the records.

cli

cli_settings

Defines some basic settings surrounding a CSV file.

errors

The module for describing recoverable errors in my CSV command-line tools.

parsing

The module for customized parsing of types for the command-line program.