If you need to add more than one column to a data function
calculation or to an axis in a visualization, you click
Select columns to show a dialog where you can pick
all columns that should be included.
Procedure
-
In the flyout when configuring a data function, first select the
Data table to pick columns from, then click
Select columns.
In the context of visualizations, you can instead reach the
Select columns dialog by right-clicking on an
axis selector (where applicable), either directly in the visualization, in the
legend, or from the visualization properties, and choose
Select columns from the pop-up menu. It can
also be triggered from other configurations.
-
In the
Select columns dialog, in the
Available columns field, select the columns
that you want to include.
You can use the search field to limit the number of columns shown
in the list. See
Searching in Spotfire clients
for more information. Use Ctrl + click to choose more than one column directly,
or click and drag with the mouse pointer to choose many columns in a sequence.
-
Click
Add to add the columns to the
Selected columns list.
-
If desired, repeat steps 2 and 3.
-
In some cases, the order of the selected columns is important for
the outcome. Click to choose one or more columns in the
Selected columns list and click
Move up or
Move down to move them to the desired order.
When running data functions, the order of the columns in this
list determines the order of the columns in the temporary data table to be used
in calculations.
-
Click
OK (or
Close) when you are done.
Results
The columns are
selected.
In some places where you can select multiple columns, you can also
specify an
Aggregation for each column. This can happen
when you configure certain visualizations, such as on the value axis of a bar
chart, where you can show multiple columns with different aggregations.
In these situations, you can click one or more columns in the
Selected columns list to make the
Aggregation option available, and specify the
aggregation method to use.
When applicable, you might also be able to use
Auto-bin column to temporarily bin a
continuous column and create an auto-bin slider. You can then specify the
starting number of bins to use. This number can be changed by dragging the
auto-bin slider in the visualization (if the column selectors of all included
columns fits in the window). For more information about the binning concept,
see
Binning.
If you select a
hierarchy in the Selected columns list, you
might also encounter the
Level slider:
This specifies which level of the hierarchy to use as a starting
point.
Another special case of this dialog is used when you are adding a
property control to a text area and you need to store the selection of columns
as a boolean column property. All of the selected columns will then receive the
value "True" on this property and the remaining columns will receive the value
"False". For more information about properties used in column selections, see
Adding a property control to a text area and
Handling column selections using a property.