Spotfire Ideas Portal
While it is possible to plug an expression into a plot axis with a document property, often it is necessary to plug that calculation into two visualizations. The difficulty is that two (or more) expressions are required because of the visualization type. For example, a user chooses "Growth Rate" from a drop down list of calculations defined in a doc property. That choice plugs a growth rate over time calculation into a bar chart with Time on the X-Axis. It also has to plug a calculation into the Cells of a cross table with a single column "Growth Rate" representing the effective growth rate from the beginning of time until the max time. No time dimension.
If two calculations could be defined in a single property control row, then we would be able to easily build a dashboard. As it stands now, a lot of Python is required to accomplish the same thing.
I agree that Python gives you a flexible approach to this problem. The scripts are not overly complicated, but many power users who are capable of working with document properties are not capable of Python scripting. I am looking for a completely OOTB way to accomplish this basic automation task without scripting, to enable more users/authors, to save time, and in the process, reduce complexity.
It is minimal python to accomplish this actually. I have done this with many of my projects as you want to use the same tab to toggle through many different metrics with the same visualization. It can be used with a simple if statement in python and referring to the document property. The benefit of doing this is you can add in more columns or less columns based on the metrics/attribute you are looking at doing. Just a thought from here that may help is all.