How Many Ways Can A CSV File Hold Multiple Entities?

Focus On the Structure

CSV, Excel, and JSONL need more validation love

Tabular data can be handled with as much rigor, quality, and efficiency as document-form, containment models (e.g. JSONSchema, XSD) or tables based data (e.g. SQL). And it should be!

As one example, CsvPath Validation Language can accommodate multiple entities living in a single tabular document using a sophisticated schema syntax as capable as DDL. In fact, it can do this at least four different ways. Each of them common enough in the wild.

1. Mixed parent-child relationships by line adjacency and order
2. Multiple entities' data lines grouped one entity after another
3. Entities side-by-side, line-by-line
4. Entities in sub-table like clusters organized visually and floating in a tabular landscape (e.g. Excel files with ancillary table/boxes for sub-calculations, dimensions, etc.)

The image above outlines each of these. Can you think of more ways to position multiple entities in a tabular CSV, Excel, or JSONL data file?

Have a look at this article on CSV validation schemas to see the syntax and some approaches used in the validation part of CsvPath Framework's data preboarding architecture.