Inconsistency in handling column name uniqueness and case-sensitivity for data export

[tibco-slolla]

It appears that column names for tables in Spotfire have to be unique and are case-insensitive. So, when pasting data from clipboard:

Example-1:

Data copied into Clipboard:

CAT	CAT	CAT
1	2	3
4	5	6
7	8	9

becomes:

CAT	CAT (2)	CAT (3)
1	2	3
4	5	6
7	8	9

Example-2:

Data copied into Clipboard:

cat	cAt	CAT
1	2	3
4	5	6
7	8	9

becomes:

cat	cAt (2)	CAT (3)
1	2	3
4	5	6
7	8	9

Pandas dataframes can be non-unique column names. Pandas dataframe column names are also case sensitive. sbdf.export_data fails to export a pandas data frame with column names as shown in example 1 but allows export of data with column names as shown in example 2.

This fails:

import pandas as pd
import spotfire

data = pd.DataFrame(
    [[1, 2, 3],
    [4, 5, 6],
    [7, 8, 9]],
    columns=["CAT", "CAT", "CAT"]
)

spotfire.sbdf.export_data(
    data,
    "duplicate_column_names.sbdf",
)

This succeeds:

import pandas as pd
import spotfire

data = pd.DataFrame(
    [[1, 2, 3],
    [4, 5, 6],
    [7, 8, 9]],
    columns=["cat", "cAt", "CAT"]
)

spotfire.sbdf.export_data(
    data,
    "column_name_case_sensitivity.sbdf",
)

This appears inconsistent -- it might be better if sbdf.export_data either supports both cases or fails for both.

[vrane-tibco]

@tibco-slolla Thank you for raising this!

You're absolutely right — for consistency, we will update the behavior so that it fails in both cases. This will help ensure predictable and uniform error handling across similar scenarios.