I noticed that the Cell Replacer vanished a few versions ago, presumably because the new Value Lookup is supposed to achieve the same thing. But after much tinkering and confusion, I still can’t achieve what I used to use the Cell Replacer for all the time, which is to replace a value if a replacement is defined in the dictionary table, but leave it unchanged otherwise. I don’t want to append another column; I just want to update the existing column in the cases where a replacement is defined.
The Cell Replacer was wonderfully simple yet flexible, whereas the Value Lookup is very difficult to understand and navigate. (I won’t be surprised if someone tells me that the Value Lookup can do this after all, but that would just reinforce my point about it being difficult to understand!)
I think the retirement of the Cell Replacer was an unfortunate loss, and I would love to see it return.
But if you make the first “if no row matches” as “Insert Missing values” and the similarly sounding “if no match found” as “Retain”, you ought to get the output you desire.
Those two options work together, but imo that isn’t clear (hence your problem), and perhaps might be better if they said something like:
If no row matches
(o)Treat as No Match Found ( ) Match Next Smaller ( ) Match Next Larger
If no match found
(o)Retain original value ( ) Insert Missing Value
Thanks for the explanation and example. I’ll give it a shot, and it’s nice to know that this can be done with the Lookup node. Hopefully the node interface can be improved, but I will still miss the simplicity of the Cell Replacer! After all there are plenty of other nodes that perform overlapping functions, so I don’t see the problem with keeping both.
thanks for the feedback. Indeed the Value Lookup node is more powerful than the old Cell Replacer. This led to the more complex dialog. I add your feedback to the list considered in our continuous efforts to make nodes more easily usable.
