Create multiple expressions from one column selection in a mod

Box plots are an example of a visualization that shows a lot of information based on very simple user input. In the simplest case the user just has to select a single column and the plot will give an overview of the distribution of the data using a number of calculated summary statistics.

A Mods author who wants to create this kind of summary visualization has to either write a lot of calculation code in Javascript or force the user to explicitly select all the expressions that the plot needs in order to be drawn.

It would be nice if it was possible to manually define a set of expressions in the Mods manifest and if those expressions were calculated and added to the data view that the Mod could use to render itself. E.g. A Box plot Mod could be defined as a having a numerical y-axis and categorical x-axis that the user could select and data view defined using expressions such as e.g. Median(%y), Q3(%y),Q1(%y) etc. etc.

That way the Mod author could take advantage of the powerful Spotfire in-memory data engine (or underlying database for direct query) to make mod development faster and improve performance since the measures will be calculated in the optimized Spotfire compiled code instead of in Javascript.