Spotfire Ideas Portal
In most dialogs in Spotfire, if you are presented with a list of columns, there is a search box. There is not a search box when you insert columns. There should be a search box in the dialog to select keys and in the dialog to choose the columns that should be inserted. Having to scroll through a list of columns that could possibly be hundreds of columns long is tedious.
| Implemented in | 7.13 |
When adding columns in Spotfire 7.13 Business Author you can search columns when creating a columns match. It will even search both columns since it's common that columns have similar names. It's in our direction to add this UI to Spotfire Analyst as well. It's already available when you edit the join which could be a work around if you define a basic joins as a start and then edit it for search.
Adding data to your analysis by inserting columns (joins) is a core part of data preparation. With Spotfire 7.13 now available you now have the alternative to add columns by using Spotfire's web client Business Author in addition to the Windows client Spotfire Analyst. This means more users will be able to do their visual data discovery in their web browser without installing Spotfire's Windows client. If you discover issues with your joins while using any of the clients you can also edit them.
A new user interface based on Spotfire's recent Add Rows UI makes it really easy to understand the different join methods through illustrations. The result is previewed before finishing the edit. The UI is also smart. For example, it shortlists and recommends id and categorical columns that share name and datatype. This makes it quicker to find the columns you are most probably looking for.
https://community.tibco.com/wiki/whats-new-tibco-spotfire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_4LC8nYpV8
Thank you very much for providing that update. My company does not use Business Author, only desktop client and web player. If the search feature didn't get added to the analyst client, it doesn't help much. I'm happy to talk with you about why we don't use it if you would like.