Version 2.8, available shortly to alpha partners, introduces a new function "dataArray", for use in Javascript. It retrieves a two-dimensional array of cell data for bulk processing and transformation.
Argument "fields": An optional array of field names. If omitted, all fields are retrieved. Argument "rowSubset": An optional data subset, as returned by the subset function. Argument "includeFieldNames": if true, the first 'row' in the returned 2d array 'table' will be the field names.
Returns: A two-dimensional array of cell data, indexed as [column][row], with indexes numbered from 0 to n-1.
See attached example, using dataArray inside a Content View.
Steve, is there any intention to bring functionality like this to normal columnar formulas? I understand it likely wouldn't be able to return more than one column, but there are ways around that using text based operations.