Working with custom expressions in Spotfire can be tricky. You try different combinations of syntax and just get errors. Sometimes the error message is helpful, but often it is just jibberish. How do you know exactly what’s getting passed thru the expression? There is a way to find out. Check out this short post for a solid pro-tip on troubleshooting custom expressions in Spotfire.
Read More »Troubleshooting Custom Expressions in Spotfire
This week I worked with one of our engineers on a Spotfire project where he needed to filter out nulls and zeros from his visualizations. This should be easy, but users set the y-axis columns using a property control. Basic data limiting by expression was impossible because the columns kept changing. Limiting data when columns change is challenging but not impossible. There are two ways to do it. Read on to learn more.
Read More »Limiting Data When Columns Change
Spotfire’s label functionality leaves a lot to be desired. You can turn on all labels, which will probably clutter the chart since you can’t move labels on most charts. Or, you can mark data points to see select labels. None of this is helpful if you want specific labels on an exported report, which is where I found myself last week. To get around Spotfire limitations and still fulfill my customer requirements, I opted to add a text area with a calculated value above my visualization. This allowed me to calculate the last value from a visualization without dealing with labels. My calculation was cumulative, so I expected that if I used the same calculation, the end result would be the last value on my visualization. It was not. Even TIBCO support was stumped as to why this didn’t work. Read on to learn a little bit more about calculated values and the Spotfire expression language.
Read More »Calculate the Last Value on a Visualization
I’ve been writing a lot about apps in the last few weeks. I started with a simple app that became more complex. This post explains how to build Alteryx apps that open and close containers with radio buttons in order to direct data thru a workflow. Read more to learn how.
Read More »Open and Close Containers with Radio Buttons
Last week, I built my first app. Then, I added on to that app. As I added on to it, the app became more complicated, and I started running into problems. I reached out to the Alteryx VSC for assistance. Part of our troubleshooting processes involved debugging, which is critical to producing successful apps. If you are ever going to build an app, you must know how to debug. Read on to find out how.
Read More »How to Debug Alteryx Apps
When I built my first app a few weeks ago, I created multiple tabs in the user interface. You would think that renaming the tabs would be easy. It wasn’t easy the first time I did it, and the Alteryx support person I worked with while building the app couldn’t remember how to do it. I found the answer in this Community post but still struggled to make it work because the post doesn’t precisely describe what to click on. So, I’ll fill in where this post left off and show you why it’s tricky! Read on to learn how to rename tabs in Alteryx apps.
Read More »How to Rename Tabs in Alteryx Apps
This week, I built my first app and will be publishing several posts on what I learned. This post will explain how to build Alteryx apps with pre-populated drop-downs. Future posts will explain how to debug apps, as well as open and close containers with radio buttons. Read on to learn how to set this up in your own workflows and apps.
Read More »Create Alteryx Apps with Pre-Populated Drop-Downs
Long load times are a problem all Spotfire users struggle with eventually. The first step to reducing load time involves understanding which tables are taking the longest to load. Spotfire provides this information in the Help menu, but it’s not in a form that is easy to work with. This week, I need to help one of our project teams optimize their Spotfire project, so I built an Excel template to parse this data. Now I know what to go after in order to improve Spotfire load times.
Read More »How to Improve Spotfire Load Times
If you’ve been following along, you know that my series on learning the Spotfire expression language is something of a long haul. It turns out that explaining Axis Names is a long and detailed affair. I am committed to it, and so this week I’m going thru axis names for line charts. If you missed it, check out Axis Names on Bar Charts.
Read More »Spotfire Axis Names on Line Charts
This week, I worked with our production team to create a downtime dashboard. The dashboard only brings in allocated data, which has a two-day lag. It makes sense to include the date of the most recent data in the visualization title. This task can be accomplished with TERR, JavaScript, or Python. I chose TERR for my project, so this post will show you how to use TERR to dynamically update visualization titles.
Read More »Use TERR to Dynamically Update Visualization Titles