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 at sales across four regions: East, Central, and West. For each location, you may want to show a visualization like the following:
If you trellis, you can show a the data split by region, but you do not get the ideal user interface you are looking for.
You can setup Filtering Schemes for each region:
But you are not able to see your information at a glance on the same page as you can only apply one Filtering Scheme per page.
There are a couple options in Spotfire 4.0 which allow you to display the visualizations for each region on the same page.
First, you can now apply a Filtering Scheme to a specific visualization (as opposed to just a page).
In the properties dialog of the visualization, in the ‘Data’ section, you can choose which Filtering Scheme(s) to apply specific to that visualization.
You can also select the ‘Use the current filtering from the page’ option so the visualization will update with the Filter Panel interactions as well (or you can uncheck all checkboxes for limiting data, and create a visualization that does not get affected by filtering changes at all).
With this we can now create 3 duplicate visualizations, each with the setting to only display data from the East, West, and Central Filtering Schemes respectively.
However, this does still require us to manually create 3 Filtering Schemes: East, Central, and APJ, and then, set the correct filtering for each scheme. So, the second option for setting this up is to use the new ‘Limit data using Expression’ feature that is built into each visualization.
This allows you to create an expression which evaluates to True or False, to limit what data is being shown. In our example we want to use an expression like the following:
if ([Region] = “East” , True, False)
This will limit the data shown in the visualization to be data where the ‘Region’ is East, and will not show any other data.
