Save me from my rube

[GregFreeman]

I want to total all data that happens on the same date. It's making me cringe that I haven't come up with another solution. May God have mercy on my soul.

[Darin.K · Accepted solution]

Nothing adds flair quite like a variant.

[nathand]

I don't have 2010 installed to try your snippet, but maybe you'd prefer to sort the original array first, something like this:

[gsussman]

Another Potential Solution

Number of iterations = number of different dates

[tst]

If you're using a database, I would suggest a simple GROUP BY and SUM combo in a query.

If not, and your main concern is aesthetics, OpenG is your friend:

It's probably not particularly efficient, and I haven't tested it, but it certainly is clean.

[GregFreeman]

Thanks for all the viable solutions! I appreciate it!

[vt92]

Darin, I really like the variant solution.  Very cool ... and quite a bit faster that the OpenG method.

[GregFreeman]

I wanted to post this because I used Darin's method to go a bit more in depth. I wanted to group by multiple things such as "Category 1" Sub Category 1 -> Total

"Category 1" Sub Category 2 -> Total etc. So...here is my solution, let me know if it can be improved

 

[JackDunaway]

---

@for(imstuck) wrote:

...let me know if it can be improved 

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Think of the Variant Attribute Name as a throw-away UID, and you can just start mashing together identifiers (using concatenate) rather than creating a hierarchy of variants of variants:

BTW - Cool solution, Darin!  And everyone vote for kegghead's Idea to make Variant Attribute atomic access cleaner syntactically (and faster?)!

[Darin.K]

To add an extra layer of protection against collision, when I concatenate strings to form an attribute tag I will add a separator (tab,pipe,etc.) that I do not expect to appear in the names themselves.  What comes in handy in many cases is my old friend Join Strings.vi.

Edit:  Was I the only one pleasantly surprised that the Variant To Data function happily dealt with an array of variants?  I can de-rubify some of my VIs now.