Rename based_on()?

[nalimilan]

As noted in #48, based_on might not be the best name for this operation. It's hard to distinguish from groupby (and doesn't follow the same naming convention with regard to the underscore).

summarize/summarise (like dplyr) might be more explicit. But it's a bit surprising that this operation also allows returning as many rows as in the original data, which is completely different from summarizing.

I wonder whether it couldn't be merged with select, as in SQL. AFAICT select doesn't work on GroupedDataFrame currently, so there would be no conflict.

[tshort]

I dislike the name based_on, so I'm good with a change. select would probably work.

[nalimilan]

It looks like that use of select would be more or less consistent with LINQ: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386922%28v=vs.110%29.aspx

(Another possibility would be combine, but I'm not sure it's used anywhere else.)

[ararslan]

+1 for changing the name. based_on isn't very descriptive and IMO is actively confusing given what it actually does.

[sswatson]

Is there still support for this change? Seems like it would be easy to implement if folks still want to do it.

[nalimilan]

Yes, I think we should merge based_on with select and transform. There's no reason to have a separate function for summarizing: whether the result contains one row per group or multiple rows per group can be determined dynamically based on whether the function returns a row or a data frame. DataFrames does this with combine on current master, and with JuliaData/DataFrames.jl#1601 DataFramesMeta could just call combine, passing it the column names and an anonymous function. You're welcome to experiment with that.

[sswatson]

Thanks for the update; I didn't realize just how current this issue is over on the DataFrames front. I'll revisit the issue a bit later, and if it seems some effort would be appreciated to make this happen on DataFramesMeta, I'll give it a try.

[nalimilan]

@pdeffebach Is there any reason to keep @based_on now that you implemented @transform?

EDIT: my bad, @based_on is equivalent to @combine, not to @transform. See #167.

[pdeffebach]

yes, we will definitely rename @based_on to @combine.

[pdeffebach]

Closed via #167