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How to build a structure that is easier to work with (i.e. for looping through and adding to)

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I have an app I am writing and what I want it to do is build a structure that will be filled with test data for various things. There will be evaulation data and validation data for battery cells and within each of these, a list of cells and for each cell a list of months and for each month, there is some data which I want as a table. ( I think).
So the full thing looks like this:
structure.Evaluation.Cell_1.Month_1.RawData
Now I've come to realise that whilst this looks nice as you're interacting with the structure in workspace. Its horrible for wanting to loop through because I need to have a way of generating the "Cell_1" and "Month_1", then next loop "Cell_1" and "Month_2"..... etc for each cell. So at the moment I am leaning heavily on "eval" to do this which just feels wrong.
So I think I want it to be more like:
structure.Evaluation.Cells.Months.RawData
So then indexing becomes the easy way to just loop through all the bits. But I am struggling with how this would look.
The RawData is a table and it could be any size but will usually have 8-10 columns and 1000's of rows. Each month has its own table of raw data. There are multiple months of data for 1 cell and then multiple cells. I can't visualise how this would look if I didn't use the first method which is effectively adaptively naming my variables. Which I know is a bit of a no-no.
Can I have the raw data table held in like 1 cell? so "Months(1) = a cell or block containing a 10 x 10,000 data table"?
then going 1 up to "Cells" there would be a cell for each month.
I am sorry if this is poorly explained. I can't really get my head round it. I have attached an example of the structure as it is now.
  5 Comments
Alex Mason
Alex Mason on 5 Sep 2023
@Stephen23 as I mention to Steven... I think the single flat table might just work. When I load the data files (these are kept in 1 folder but are containing "month_x" and "cell_y" in their naming structure) I could just vertically concatenate the data sets whilst also adding 3 new columns : Month, Cell, Type. I will know all these infos because its contained in the filenames and I can already extract those. Then I can use logical masks to single out chunks of data.
My concern would be how big the table gets but I assume Matlab is OK with the potential for millions of rows?
This is battery cell characterisation data. The cells are monitored for around 9 months. So depending on logging rate there could be a lot of data.
Stephen23
Stephen23 on 5 Sep 2023
"My concern would be how big the table gets but I assume Matlab is OK with the potential for millions of rows?"
MATLAB has no problem with this, it depends more on your available computer memory.
Another option would be to use a datastore / tall arrays:

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Accepted Answer

Bruno Luong
Bruno Luong on 4 Sep 2023
Edited: Bruno Luong on 5 Sep 2023
If I was you I organize the data like this, just a linear array of structs
load('structure.mat');
NewDataStruct = struct('DataInfo', shareData.DataInfo);
NewDataStruct.DataRecord = ConvertRawData(shareData, struct())
function DataRecord = ConvertRawData(s, info)
f = fieldnames(s);
DataRecord = [];
for k=1:length(f)
fk = f{k};
Tmp = [];
switch fk
case 'RawData'
Tmp = info;
Tmp.RawData = s.(fk);
case {'EvaluationData', 'ValidationData'}
info.Type = fk;
otherwise
N = regexp(fk,'Month_(\d+)|Cell_(\d+)', 'tokens', 'once');
if ~isempty(N)
N = str2double(N{1});
fbase = fk(1:find(fk=='_',1)-1);
info.(fbase) = N;
end
end
if isstruct(s.(fk))
Tmp = ConvertRawData(s.(fk), info);
end
if ~isempty(Tmp)
if isempty(DataRecord)
DataRecord = Tmp;
else
DataRecord = [DataRecord; Tmp]; %#ok
end
end
end
end
  4 Comments
Bruno Luong
Bruno Luong on 5 Sep 2023
"If I want to loop through and load/work on the cell 1 data, how do i index or reference that?"
filter = [NewDataStruct.DataRecord.Cell] == 1;
DataFiltered = NewDataStruct.DataRecord(filter)

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More Answers (2)

Steven Lord
Steven Lord on 4 Sep 2023
I'd probably store this either as a timetable (with the date and time data stored as the RowTimes, and as many data variables as you need) or as a table with multiple colums for your cell and month data. Then you could use logical indexing into the rows of the tabular array (either using matches or startsWith on the column containing your month "names" or using the month function on the RowTimes and selecting the appropriate month numbers.
  1 Comment
Alex Mason
Alex Mason on 5 Sep 2023
Hi Steven, I will explore this.
Not sure about the timetable and having row names as the time/date? I guess what I could do is literally concatenate 2 new columns "month" and "cell" to the data array and just sift through in that fashion. I could just use logical checks to mask out the chunks of data needed based on month number AND cell number.
I will have a read about timetables though. I am not familiar with them at all which is perhaps why I can't imagine how it might work.

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Bruno Luong
Bruno Luong on 5 Sep 2023
Edited: Bruno Luong on 5 Sep 2023
If you want to organize as a single giant table.
IMO if you don't need to mix part of the tables, you should not do this way. Keep array of tables as my other solution is better.
load('structure.mat');
NewDataStruct = struct('DataInfo', shareData.DataInfo, ...
'Data', ConvertRawData2SingleTable(shareData, struct()))
function DataRecord = ConvertRawData2SingleTable(s, info)
f = fieldnames(s);
DataRecord = [];
for k=1:length(f)
fk = f{k};
Tmp = [];
switch fk
case 'RawData'
T = s.(fk);
infof = fieldnames(info);
for j=1:length(infof)
T.(infof{j})(:) = info.(infof{j});
end
Tmp = T;
case {'EvaluationData', 'ValidationData'}
info.Type = string(fk);
otherwise
N = regexp(fk,'Month_(\d+)|Cell_(\d+)', 'tokens', 'once');
if ~isempty(N)
N = str2double(N{1});
fbase = fk(1:find(fk=='_',1)-1);
info.(fbase) = N;
end
end
if isstruct(s.(fk))
Tmp = ConvertRawData2SingleTable(s.(fk), info);
end
if ~isempty(Tmp)
if isempty(DataRecord)
DataRecord = Tmp;
else
DataRecord = [DataRecord; Tmp]; %#ok
end
end
end
end
  2 Comments
Bruno Luong
Bruno Luong on 5 Sep 2023
Edited: Bruno Luong on 6 Sep 2023
Note that how the extra memory required by single table storage after conversion
>> whos
Name Size Bytes Class Attributes
NewDataStruct 1x1 362504847 struct
shareData 1x1 165267346 struct
dpb
dpb on 6 Sep 2023
IF were to go to timetable, use the datetime for the date rather than augmenting with a month/day extra columns; use lookup within it for time selection to process; retime might be of use.
In a table, the extra memory is compensated for by the handy nature of rowfun and grouping variables to do all kinds of magical analyses in very few lines of code -- again IF the nature of the analysis is by some set of variables.
If it's simply iterating through each dataset one at a time, not a whole lot to be gained as Bruno says...but we've no knowledge of what your end objectives are with which to guide the tools to use.

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