Many TimeXtender users find the current way of dealing with data type changes quite unnatural to work with. There are many cases where you want to change the data type in Prepare (separate from the painful way to deal with typing in Ingest).
A user's instinct is to change the type of a field through ‘Edit field” but this will lead to errors usually. I.e. changing a string to a datetime. Needing to define a new field with the target type and setting up a transformation on that field is a lot of work. You would expect to be able to define a CAST to deal with this ‘between’ Ingest and Prepare, or between Raw and Valid.
My suggestion would be to allow a cast to happen between the raw and valid table. This should both support straight casting, int to varchar or similar, and more complex ones like using (try) convert to change a text field into a date. It would be great if you could set up pattern-based text-to-datetime conversions from the UI instead of needing to write sql. It would also be good to wrap conversions in try and be able to specify a fallback value.
One of the main reasons for doing this in Prepare vs. Ingest is that data type conversions are expensive in Ingest and obviously less flexible.
