In this week's post, we will introduce you to another excited new feature of TIBCO Spotfire 3.1, Conditional Coloring. Let's assume you have a Data Table which provides sales data for a particular store. The sales are broken up into three separate product categories: Furniture, Office Supplies, and Technology, and sales are measured across the different store locations per state.
Let's assume we want to highlight the top 5 sales result and the bottom 5 sales result for the combination of products and states. To do this, we can use TIBCO Spotfire's Conditional Coloring to color the top 5 values green and the bottom 5 values red.
We configure these settings inside the Color section of the Table's Properties Dialog. First we create a Color Scheme Group that includes all the product columns: Furniture, Office Supplies, and Technology. We then add a Conditional Coloring rule, using the 'Add Rule' button and select the Top rule and set the value to 5 as shown below:
This will then color the table so that the top 5 highest sales are colored green.
As you can see, all 5 are from the office supplies column. What if we wanted to see the top 5 for each product? We then change the color scaling for this group to be by Column.
The result now shows the top 5 sales in each product colored.
We can now repeat this, but using the Bottom rule instead of Top to color the bottom 5 sales in each product red.
Some of the additional benefits of using the Conditional Coloring Rules are that the coloring is updated to reflect the changes in the data , including filtering. In addition, you can expose the values for top and bottom as Property Controls so that the business user can alter the values when desired.
In the screen shot below, you can see we exposed the top and bottom values as a slider control to let the user define how many values to color.
More details on Conditional Coloring, including Color Schemes, Color Scaling, Using Expressions in Coloring, additional Conditional Coloring Rules, and other updates are discussed in detail in both the 3.1 Delta Training Course and the TIBCO Spotfire Business Author Bootcamp.
