Why does Sparkflows never fall back to STRING for numeric columns in Read Excel Advanced?

General
1

When numeric parsing fails, values should revert to STRING.

What Sparkflows actually does

Sparkflows never downgrades a numeric column to STRING once a numeric type is chosen.

Instead:

  • Valid values are parsed

  • Invalid values become null

  • Column type is preserved

This applies to:

  • INTEGER

  • LONG

  • DOUBLE

  • TIMESTAMP

Why this is intentional

Falling back to STRING:

  • Breaks aggregations

  • Corrupts numeric semantics

  • Creates silent data quality issues

Sparkflows enforces schema correctness over permissiveness.

Result

Cleaner data, predictable pipelines, safer analytics.