Actions in Spotfire offer a wide range of possibilities to perform tasks from within an analysis, and also to include tasks that affect external systems.

Actions can appear in text areas and visualizations, and they are initiated using various controls or triggers. For example, you can encounter actions that control the workflow through an analysis, run scripts, or let you send data externally. That is, the contents of the actions can differ a lot, and in addition, the way they are added differs depending on the context.

Actions that perform tasks within an analysis

These actions are mostly handled from text areas. Text area buttons and links are provided that can initiate tasks like application of bookmarks, navigation workflows, or execution of data functions and scripts. These types of actions can also be defined in KPI charts and graphical tables.

Actions that perform tasks involving external systems

Your findings in a visualization might sometimes make you want to take an action in another system. For example, you might want to send certain information and data that you see to another application. Such external actions can be triggered directly from a visualization if a configurator has added the action to your analysis in the Spotfire Analyst client. A configurator defines which triggers should be available in the visualizations, and what information the action should send. Anyone opening the analysis can potentially use the configured action trigger to send data. Before you give approval to send any data externally, you can review it.