This question is coming from someone who is working on making the transition from R to F#. I fully acknowledge my approach here may be wrong so I am looking for the F# way of doing this. I have a situation where I want iterate through a set of XML files, parse them, and extract several values to identify which ones need further processing. My natural inclination is to Map over the array of XML data, exampleData in this case, parse each using the RawDataProvider type provider, and finally create a Map object for each file containing the parsed XML, the Status value from the XML, and the ItemId value.
Turns out that the Map type in F# is not like a List in R. Lists in R are essentially hashmaps which can support having mixed types. It appears that the Map type in F# does not support storing mixed types. I have found this to be incredibly useful in my R work and am looking for what the right F# collection is for this.
Or, am I thinking about this all wrong? This is a very natural way for me to process data in R so I would expect there would be a way to do it in F# as well. The assumption is that I am going to do further analysis and add additional elements of data to these collections.
Update: This seems like such a simple use case that there must be an idiomatic way of doing this in F# without having to define a Record type for each step of the analysis. I have updated my example to further illustrate what I am trying to do. I want to return an Array of the Map objects that I have analyzed:
type RawDataProvider = XmlProvider<"""<product Status="Good" ItemId="123" />""">
let exampleData = [| """<product Status="Good" ItemId="123" />"""; """<product Status="Bad" ItemId="456" />"""; """<product Status="Good" ItemId="789" />"""|]
let dataResult =
exampleData
|> Array.map(fun fileData -> RawDataProvider.Parse(fileData))
|> Array.map(fun xml -> Map.empty.Add("xml", xml).Add("Status", xml.Status).Add("ItemId", xml.ItemId))
|> Array.map(fun elem -> elem.["calc1Value"] = calc1 elem["itemId"])
|> Array.map(fun elem -> elem.["calc2"] = calc2 elem.["ItemId"] elem.["calc1Value"])