Spotfire: How to modify or delete public bookmarks

Problem

Unable to modify or delete public bookmarks in Spotfire.

Solution

Bookmarks are snapshots of the state of an analysis. Public bookmarks are created for public usage by many users. Sometimes the user account who created Public bookmarks gets disabled, and under such circumstances, the options for Update and Delete are disabled for other users. This article explains a couple solutions for how to update them in this situation.

Public bookmarks can only be updated/deleted by the user account who created them or Spotfire Administrators (Users part of Administrator group). Other users cannot update public bookmarks. So in order to update such bookmarks either the Spotfire Administrator can update them, or other users can use the following workarounds.

Note: The Author property for bookmarks is a read-only property in the public API - it cannot be updated from an Iron Python script (i.e. change author from from userA to userB).

Update Bookmarks:

For small number of bookmarks:
Other users can create private copies of these bookmarks where Update/Delete is disabled by right clicking on the bookmark and selecting "Save as Private Bookmark" option. See bookmark pop up menu options for more details. Once the private copy is created, the visibility of that new copy can be changed to "Public" using same bookmark pop up menu.

For large number of bookmarks:
You can use an Iron Python script to save private copies of such public bookmarks. For example:

from Spotfire.Dxp.Application.AnalyticItems import BookmarkManager
bookmarkManager = Application.GetService(BookmarkManager)

for b in bookmarkManager.GetBookmarks():
    if b.IsPublic==True and b.Author=="abc": #Author is the user name/user id of bookmark creator. It is not display name of user.
        c=bookmarkManager.SavePrivateCopy(b)
        bookmarkManager.SetPublicVisibility(c,"true") #If you intend to change the visibility of the private bookmark copy to public

You can even modify the above script to pass specific bookmark names to change visibility or make private copies. See BookmarkManager Class Iron Python API for other methods as well

Delete Bookmarks:
Other users cannot delete public bookmarks. So if either the bookmark author or Spotfire Administrator wants to delete bookmarks in bulk they can see "How to Add, Apply and Remove a Bookmark using IronPython in TIBCO Spotfire®" for details
 

References 

Doc: What are bookmarks?

• https://docs.tibco.com/pub/sfire-analyst/14.6.3/doc/html/en-US/TIB_sfire_client/client/topics/en-US/using_bookmarks.html

Doc: Bookmark Manager Iron Python API

• https://docs.tibco.com/pub/doc_remote/sfire_dev/area/doc/api/TIB_sfire-analyst_api/html/T_Spotfire_Dxp_Application_AnalyticItems_BookmarkManager.htm

Doc: Bookmark pop up Menu

• https://docs.tibco.com/pub/sfire-analyst/14.6.3/doc/html/en-US/TIB_sfire_client/client/topics/en-US/using_bookmarks.html

Wiki: How to Add, Apply and Remove a Bookmark using IronPython in TIBCO Spotfire

• https://community.spotfire.com/articles/spotfire/how-add-apply-and-remove-bookmark-using-ironpython-spotfirer/