Knowledge Base

Adding a Filter Control into a Text Area

2012-01-26T01:21:00Z

Many times authors will want to allow a user to filter out values in a given column, but they do not want to expose the Filter Panel, as it can add confusion and complexity for a consumer. The workaround has been to use a Property Control to provide this capability from within a Text Area. This solution had a series of unwanted side effects if it was not setup properly. In 4.0, we now have the ability to embed a Filter for a specific Column directly into a Text Area. This also allows authors to make...(read more)

Guiding the User Through an Analysis Without Showing all Pages Available

2012-01-07T07:48:00Z

When setting up an analysis file, there are times when you want the consumer to be guided through the analysis and not be distracted by the different pages available to click through. In version 4.0, this can be accomplished by setting the Page Navigation mode to ‘None’. Once you do this, you will then need to use an Action Control or Script Control to navigate between pages. NOTE: Users inside Spotfire Professional can simply switch the Page Navigation mode, but consumers using the Web Player will...(read more)

Executing Scripts within other Scripts

2011-12-26T15:54:00Z

There are some situations where you will want to execute a script from within another script. This could be to combine multiple scripts into one single action call (from a button, link, or image inside a Text Area), or it could be to enable the execution of various scripts based off some logic checks inside a master script. The following script will execute another script (name ‘secondScript’ that already exists and is stored inside the same Spotfire Analysis file): from System.Collections.Generic...(read more)

Information At a Glance with Graphics Tables

2011-12-10T23:46:00Z

Many managers and consumers need methods to quickly see the state of their business, including Key Performance Indictors (KPI). In addition, they may need to quickly spot changes in these values over time and also whether the values are trending up or down. This can be done in TIBCO Spotfire 4.0 using the new Graphical Table visualization. Graphical Tables are a new visualization provided in TIBCO Spotfire 4.0 which is designed to provide information at a glance. The Graphics Table is a table-based...(read more)

Limiting Data to Display in Visualizations in TIBCO Spotfire 4.0

2011-11-22T01:45:00Z

There are often scenarios where you will need to limit the data to display in a given visualization. In most of the approaches, the solution is to filter data. However, this filtering is not directly tied to a visualization. Rather, it is tied to a Filtering Scheme, which affects an entire page or pages. In TIBCO Spotfire 4.0, there are two new features that allow you to easily filter data in a specific visualization, without affecting the data to display in other visualizations. Suppose we are looking...(read more)

Creating Property Control Groups that do not automatically update Expressions and Calculations

2011-11-14T01:54:00Z

In certain scenarios, there is a requirement to have multiple Property Controls that drive a given analysis file. The values behind these Property Controls will all be used in a series of expressions and calculations. However, the way these expressions and calculations works means that they will be recalculated each time the property values change. This is OK in some situations, but in many scenarios you want to trigger the update after all Property Control values have been updated (or at least allow...(read more)

Displaying Property Controls inside HTML Tables

2011-10-17T01:03:00Z

In previous tips , we have discussed how you can add HTML directly into a Text Area. To take this one step further, you may want to take Property Controls that you have already created and then add them into a HTML table or CSS positioning element to provide a more exact and better looking layout. This tip will explain how that can be accomplished. First, you should start by building the Property Controls which you wish to use. This can include any combinations of the built-in Property Controls and...(read more)

Formatting Values in Tooltips

2011-10-02T23:55:00Z

In this tip we will discuss how to update the formatting on a Visualization's tooltips. Assume we have a Bar Chart which displays the sum of sales for each year in our data table. What if we then want to change the y-axis to show the Percentage of Total Sales for each year. This would require changing the y-axis to a custom expression using the OVER function: Sum([Sales]) / Sum([Sales]) OVER (All([Axis.X])) The formatting will still stay as a currency type (as that is what it was when we started...(read more)

Dynamically Updating Fixed Values in a Drop-down list Property Control

2011-09-25T20:19:00Z

There are some situations where you will want to have a Drop-down list Property Control display fixed values. This is easily accomplished by using the ‘Fixed values’ option for setting the property value, and then entering your fixed values and their display names. In other situations, you may want those fixed values to update depending on certain conditions. It could be that you only want to show some of them at any given point in time, or it could be that you want the values to completely change...(read more)

Displaying Images in a Label Property Control

2011-09-13T02:30:00Z

In last week’s post, we learned how to create custom Property Controls in the form of Radio Buttons and Checkboxes. As it turns out, this solution works well using the Web Player from Internet Explorer, but the wingdings fonts do not display as they should in Firefox or Chrome. To correct this, and to learn another nice feature, we will replace the wingding fonts with a graphic in the Label Property Control. This can be accomplished out of the box using a Data Function, but that requires S+ or R...(read more)

Creating Radio Button and Checkbox Property Controls

2011-09-06T01:31:00Z

This is the first post after the Tip of the Week blog’s summer hiatus. We are back now and will start out with a series of tips related to using Text Areas to create Guided Analysis files. In this first tip back we will discuss how to create new Property Control types (radio buttons and check boxes) using a combination of Document Properties, Labels, and Scripts. While these are not truly built-in Property Controls, they do work and function properly. In this first example we will look at building...(read more)

Insert As Text vs Insert As Value

2011-07-11T03:02:00Z

The concept of Document Properties has existed in TIBCO Spotfire for quite some time. In version 3.1, the concept of properties was extended and included the ability to expose controls to allow consumers to change property values. When this update happened, Spotfire continued to support the old mechanism for adding properties into expressions as well as supported a newer , pre-processor approach. The default mechanism, from version 3.1 and later, for adding properties into an expression is to use...(read more)

Share insights on tibbr with TIBCO Spotfire 3.3

2011-07-07T11:54:00Z

This article targets: TIBCO Spotfire 3.3 and forward TibbrTool_1.3.zip

Introduction

This article describes a tool that integrates TIBCO Spotfire with tibbr in order to share and discuss an insight or visualization with others. We use the improved Bookmarks functionality in TIBCO Spotfire 3.3 to create a snapshot of a visualization and then display it later on. The tool makes it possible to post a message together with a visualization to tibbr. The tool can be used from inside TIBCO Spotfire Professional or TIBCO Spotfire Web Player. All the source code needed for the tool is available in the attached zip file. The zip file also contains spk files ready for distribution.

Launching the tool

Using Spotfire Professional you will find the tool in the context menu for any of the visualizations.

In the TIBCO Spotfire Web Player you will find the tool among the export tools to the left.

Tool dialog

The tool will bring up the Post to tibbr dialog (TIBCO Spotfire Professional version).

The TIBCO Spotfire Web Player version of the same dialog is shown below. It is the currently active visualization that will be used in the tool.

You can provide a message and a link to the analysis file together with the visualization. The link will be attached to the message and makes it possible to open the analysis file in the TIBCO Spotfire Web Player from the tibbr flow. Linking is only available when the analysis is opened from the library.

Posting to Subjects

By default the tib (message) is posted to your tibbr wall. You can direct your tib to any tibbr subject by simply providing the subject string before the message.
For example entering the message @johndoe Hello would post “Hello” to John Doe’s wall.
You can also supply multiple subjects like this: @spotfire @tibbr Hey you two, play nice now posts the message to both the Spotfire and the tibbr subjects.

Implementation Details

The code is divided into three different parts:

TibbrTool – contains the code for doing the actual “work” in the tool, together with utility classes for preferences, bookmarks, images and tibbr.
TibbrToolForms – contains the UI parts for TIBCO Spotfire Professional.
TibbrToolWeb – contains the UI parts for the TIBCO Spotfire Web Player.

This is the recommended way of organizing the code when doing an extension for a tool that have user interface elements for both Professional and Web Player. For more information, see Creating Extensions to the Spotfire Platform.

Some API:s used in the tool that are worth special mentioning:

Visual.Render – used to render a visualization to a Graphics context.
CustomPreference – used for saving information related to the tibbr server and your user name.
NotificationService.AddErrorNotification – used for notifying the user if something went wrong while posting to tibbr. This is displayed in the status bar.
BookmarkManager – used for handling bookmarks.
CustomWizardPromptControl and CustomWizardPromptControlPage – used for building the dialog/HTML form for the Web Player client.

Sharing your Analysis – Even better in 3.3

2011-06-20T01:45:00Z

In earlier posts , we discussed how to share your analysis with others using a variety of approaches. With the release of version 3.3 of TIBCO Spotfire, there are quite a few more approaches available. The major update is that Spotfire now provides a way to execute a Bookmark and a Configuration Block directly when launching Spotfire and opening a file. This is supported in both the Web Player and Professional clients. Launching analysis files via URL To open Spotfire Professional and launch a file...(read more)

Updated Time Hierarchies in version 3.3

2011-06-13T10:45:00Z

Before Spotfire version 3.3, time hierarchies were treated just like all other hierarchies. In version 3.3, a new built-in hierarchy is available specific to dates and times. They use the new BinByDateTime() function to create the expression as shown in the image below. With the new support for time series hierarchies, visualizations which have a time series on one of their axis will now display a slider by default. See the image below which shows the pre 3.3 visualization on top and then how it...(read more)