How to assign data types when loading data files in TIBCO Spotfire

Product:TIBCO Spotfire Analyst
Versions:All

Summary:
This article explains how to assign data types to each column when opening data files (.csv, .xlsx, etc) in TIBCO Spotfire

Details:
When opening a file in TIBCO Spotfire Analyst and other installed clients, the program looks at the first 100 rows to automatically determine the data type for each column (Integer, Real, String, Date, etc).  But in situations where there is very sparse data (no values in first 100 row sample) or the first 100 rows is not a fully representative set of data (the first 100 rows have integers, but there are strings in later rows) then some columns might be assigned an incorrect or undesired data type. 

Resolution:
To avoid having to set each column's data type manually during the import process, you can add the data type as a new row in the data file.  For example, see the 2nd row:

Col1,Col2,Col3
string,real,integer
abd,2,3
,,
,3,1
5,,

When the data is being added to Spotfire, this will then be used as the "Type row" which will determine which data type the column will be in Spotfire:


Note that if there is a need to assign data types but the method described above is not applicable, one other option could be to use a Change Data Types Transformation. For more information on that, see the manual: https://docs.tibco.com/pub/sfire-analyst/11.4.0/doc/html/en-US/TIB_sfire-analyst_UsersGuide/data/data_details_on_change_data_type.htm