Dashboard features examples

The intention of the following examples is to give hints of what can be achieved, and inspire you to further investigations of the Spotfire features to get the dashboards you want.

Note: Some of the functionality described here can only be authored or accessed using the installed Spotfire client.

Switching off filtering in a visualization

A typical interaction in a dashboard is filtering the data. By default, any filtering you do affects all visualizations on the page, if they are based on the same data table. There might be times, though, when you want a visualization to stay unaffected of the filtering, for example, if you want to use it as a reference. Then you can switch off the filtering for that particular visualization.

Go to the Properties for the visualization, and locate the Data section. Under Data limiting, remove all filtering limitations.

Example

The bar charts below are based on the following simple data table.

In the bar chart to the left, you can see the total sales for all regions, and in the bar chart to the right, you see the sales for the region that is selected in the filter. This way, you can view the entire sales and the sales for a specific region at the same time.

This is possible because the filtering is switched off for the left bar chart by removing Use the current filtering from the page (and any other filtering) from the visualization properties, under Data.

Another alternative to compare all data to filtered data is the use of Subsets.

Making text dynamic

The images below are excerpts from the example in the Dashboards topic. Note that not only the numbers are changed when interacting with the dashboard; the top text to the right also reflects what is currently selected in the Region filter.

How this is done is described below.

In the left text area, a filter control has been added that lets you select a region, and then demographic data for that region is displayed in the text area to the right. To update the text to show the region that is currently selected, a dynamic item is used.

Note: Text areas are authored using the installed client.

Right-click the text area and select Edit Text Area.
Click Insert Dynamic Item, and select Calculated Value.
In the Settings dialog for the calculated value, select Values.
Right-click the Calculate values using selector, and choose Custom Expression.

In the Custom Expression dialog, enter the expression:

case UniqueCount([Region])
   when 0 then "None"
   when 1 then First([Region])
   else "All countries"
end

Close the custom expression and calculated value settings dialogs.
In the Edit Text Area dialog, click Save.
The dynamic Calculated value item shows the evaluation of the expression. If a region is selected in the filter control, the name of that region is displayed, and if the (All) option is selected, the result is 'All countries', respectively.