Support for null (undefined) values in logical binary table columns #451
Labels
enhancement
A new feature and/or an improved capability
standard
Improved compliance to FITS standard
Milestone
FITS logical columns in binary tables can store true/false values but also undefined (null) values, as the bytes 'T', 'F', and 0 respectively. So far we have not supported the undefined (null) values because we identified logical columns with the Java primitive
boolean
, which can have only true/false states. (On that note, booleans can be better supported by bit-based columns, see #450).We should allow creating, setting, and accessing logical columns as the boxed Java
Boolean
values, which may benull
to signify undefined logical values in binary tables.Thus,
addColumn()
,setElement()
,setColumn()
andsetRow()
may thus accept arrays ofBoolean
. However, to keep our code backward compatible,getElement()
,getRow(), and
getColumn()will return values as
booleanarrays. As such we need new methods to access logical column data as
Booleanvalues, at least on the element level. (see new
BinaryTable.get()` method in #448)The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: