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Explanation of marking and how it is displayed in visualizations in TIBCO Spotfire

Rich Talbot
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Product: TIBCO Spotfire®

Problem:

Explanation of marking and how it is displayed in visualizations in TIBCO Spotfire


Solution:

See the resolution below for an explanation of what is happening when data is marked in a visualization in TIBCO Spotfire, and how that marking is displayed. Marking in Spotfire is expressed per data table and has a resolution of rows. This means that a row in a given data table is either marked or not marked; there is no concept of marking parts of a row. There are two fundamental design principles that concern marking, its behavior, and how the marking is represented in visualizations:

  1. When marking is performed in one visualization, all other visualizations shall indicate which rows are marked, translated to the graphics specific for each visualization. This behavior is sometimes called brush-linking.
  2. When marking is performed in a visualization, it shall show what is marked as granularly as possible so that it corresponds to the graphical elements that the user interacted with to perform the marking.
To uphold the second principle above, the visualization where marking is performed stores some additional marking information in addition to the centrally stored set of marked rows. Since all other visualizations will display which rows are marked based on this row set, it is possible to have two identically configured visualizations showing different graphical elements as marked. This occurs when the visualizations show multiple graphical elements originating from each row in the data table, for example in a Line Chart with multiple measures on the Y-axis and "(Column Names)" on the Trellis axis. Here, each row in the data table contributes to two points in two lines, one in each trellis panel.

There are several operations the user can perform that makes Spotfire unable to use the visualization specific marking information. For instance, removing the visualization followed by undo, and the steps mentioned in the description of this issue involving filter-to-marked followed by undo. In such cases, the visualization where marking was performed falls back to showing the marking based only on the set of marked rows in the data table, translated to the graphics of the visualization. Doc: Marking in Visualizations

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