Knowledge Base

Adding a Filter Control into a Text Area

Tip of the Week — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:21:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Guiding the User Through an Analysis Without Showing all Pages Available

Tip of the Week — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 07:48:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Executing Scripts within other Scripts

Tip of the Week — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:54:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Information At a Glance with Graphics Tables

Tip of the Week — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:46:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Limiting Data to Display in Visualizations in TIBCO Spotfire 4.0

Tip of the Week — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:45:00 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Tip of the Week — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 01:54:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Displaying Property Controls inside HTML Tables

Tip of the Week — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 01:03:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Formatting Values in Tooltips

Tip of the Week — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:55:00 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Tip of the Week — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 20:19:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Displaying Images in a Label Property Control

Tip of the Week — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 02:30:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Creating Radio Button and Checkbox Property Controls

Tip of the Week — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 01:31:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Insert As Text vs Insert As Value

Tip of the Week — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 03:02:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Share insights on tibbr with TIBCO Spotfire 3.3

Anna Lundberg — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:54:00 GMT

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

Tip of the Week — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 01:45:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Updated Time Hierarchies in version 3.3

Tip of the Week — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:45:00 GMT

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...(read more)