[ARROW-602] [C++] Provide iterator access to primitive elements inside a ChunkedArray

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 9.0.0
• Component/s: C++
• Labels: beginner good-first-issue newbie pull-request-available
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/16233
• Assignee: Alvin Chunga Mamani
• Reporter: Uwe Korn
• Created: 04/Mar/17 11:23
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 10:09
• Resolved: 11/May/22 19:54

Description

Given a ChunkedArray, an Arrow user must currently iterate over all its chunks and then cast them to their types to extract the primitive memory regions to access the values. A convenient way to access the underlying values would be to offer a function that takes a ChunkedArray and returns a C++ iterator over all elements.

While this may not be the most performant way to access the underlying data, it should have sufficient performance and adds a convenience layer for new users.

Issue Links

• relates to: ARROW-7363 [Python] Add combine_chunks method to ChunkedArray
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #13009