How to create a process from EcoSpold 1 with more than one new sub-category ?

Question

Hi,

I want to create a process from an ES1 file.

I want to insert this process in a custom category in openLCA categories tree, generated from the Ecoinvent database I imported. I want my process to go in the existing "Agricultural" root category, but adding two sub categories. It should look like this :
- Agricultural
  - MyCustomSubCategory
    - MyCustomSubSubCategory
      - MyProcess

So in my ES1, I wrote (in the process attributes) category = "Agricultural" and subCategory = "MyCustomSubCategory\MyCustomSubSubCategory". This works with Simapro. It works in openLCA if there is only one level of sub category to create.

Do you support this kind of behaviour ?

Thank you in advance,
Clement

Answer 1

This is currently not supported. EcoSpold 1 has a `category` and `subCategory` field and these fields are currently used as plain category names in the import. To support paths in these fields, this would be the entry point: https://github.com/GreenDelta/olca-modules/blob/master/olca-io/src/main/java/org/openlca/io/ecospold1/input/EcoSpold01Import.java#L401

Then, it would make sense to also support paths for flow categories and rewrite this function here: https://github.com/GreenDelta/olca-modules/blob/master/olca-io/src/main/java/org/openlca/io/ecospold1/input/DB.java#L48

It is maybe 0.5 days of effort to correctly implement and update this. There are currently no plans to update the EcoSpold 1 import as the format is a bit outdated. But you can of course send pull requests for code modifications or buy some developer support to get this implemented: https://www.openlca.org/helpdesk/.