New widget - set .attributes of a feature or Table

[borondics]

What's your use case?

We are using attributes more and more to carry information about the dataset. However, it doesn't seem possible to add new attributes from inside Orange. This becomes a problem if the necessary fields are not populated for any reason.

What's your proposed solution?

It would be great to have an Add attribute widget, where the user would specify the name of the attribute and then the value (string).

Are there any alternative solutions?

One can edit files but in that case they would need to conform to the individual file structure.

[ajdapretnar]

Like a mash-up between Formula and Create Table?

[borondics]

Actually, it could be a feature addition to Formula but it would insert information into the Table or the Feature attributes...

[markotoplak]

Setting .attributes of a Variable would go into Edit domain.

Setting .attributes of a Table (as shown in Data Info). No idea. We only used these internally for now (for example setting species in bioinformatics add-on). I am not sure exposing them makes much sense.

An alternative here is to use the Python script widget when needed.

I see this issue describing two wholly separate problems. And I am not really sure if these things should get exposed.

[markotoplak]

Setting .attributes manually should never be necessary.

In Bioinformatics, they ere designed so that if a user selects a specific species in one widget, other widgets will use that as a default. So, .attributes were used as something optional and not functionally necessary.

If .attributes are required I think a custom widget for setting them is in order, like As fairness data from the Fairness add-on. In such cases, values should be carefully crafted so that they are valid (and they are not limited to strings anyway).

So I'd say this is a wontfix. If anyone needs them, there should be a custom setter widget.