Breadcrumbs

Can S2PX automatically remove unsupported characters from column names?

Question

For the jobs remediation task of Column Name Contains Unsupported Characters, can S2PX remove these characters, or must the change be done manually?

Answer

S2PX could be modified to enable this change to be performed automatically, however there are a number of implications of doing this that would make automating the process a bad idea. Renaming columns would potentially…

  • break any derivations (expressions) that refer to them.

  • change the schema of any input or output stages.

  • break jobs where the the invalid character was a field name in a Database table and S2PX just stripped those characters from the job

  • break downstream systems which rely on your jobs producing sequential files which have different column names in the header to those expected

For this reason column name changes should be performed manually, with all potential implications considered and managed by your development team.