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Spotfire 14.4 focuses on enhancing your analytical workflows through powerful new automation and customization features. This release empowers you to solve complex problems faster and immerse yourself deeper in your data, ultimately accelerating your journey to brilliant solutions.
Action mods extend Spotfire with a new type of lightweight reusable action component that can be tailored for specific domains and use cases. Using actions within visual analytics provides extensive options for carrying out tasks and enhancing workflows across all analytic elements, spanning from visualizations to data.
What they are: An action mod is a collection of actions (scripts) packaged together for easy sharing and reuse.
How they empower you: Actions can be added to various controls and triggers in visualizations, text areas, or initiated directly from the new Actions flyout or the Spotfire library. Triggers can be added to visualizations using the new Action trigger card in the Visualization properties panel or via drag-and-drop from the Actions flyout.
Practical Applications: Action mods use the comprehensive Spotfire API, allowing for implementing actions such as:
Create and configure visualizations
Drill down or up in hierarchical data
Navigate to pages and visualizations
Run data functions and transformations
Apply page layouts
And much more
More configuration and appearance settings are available, enhancing your ability to visualize data exactly how you need it:
Assign labels to data points
Show markers in line and combination charts
Configure projection in map charts
Display total bars in waterfall charts
Configure actions on visualizations
Automation Services jobs now support looping and scripting with two new tasks: ForEach and Execute Script. These powerful tasks can be used together and combined with other built-in Automation Services tasks to implement an almost unlimited number of automation use cases.
Looping with the ForEach Task: This task allows jobs to iterate over a user-defined input table containing property values such as file paths, filter values, bookmark names, or email addresses. For each row, a series of other tasks is executed, with the property values of the current row inserted into various text fields.
Scripting with the Execute Script Task: This task enables fully customized automation jobs by running user-defined IronPython scripts. Through the Spotfire API, these scripts can read and modify pages, visualizations, data tables, filters, embedded scripts, and other content of an analysis file.
It is now possible to automate the processing and modification of large sets of analysis files stored in the Spotfire library using custom scripts. This approach is valuable and time-saving when the library contains a large number of analysis files that require similar edits, as manual handling would be tedious and time-consumin
The possible edits are limited by what is exposed in the Spotfire API. Examples include:
Cleaning up analysis files by removing unreferenced items, such as markings, filtering schemes, and data tables.
Updating scripts in analysis files to use a newer IronPython version.
Embedding jQuery/jQueryUI library instances in text areas and modifying JavaScript scripts to avoid referencing internally used libraries.
This functionality is made possible by the new Automation Services tasks for looping and scripting in combination with other tasks like open/save analysis file.
You can now distribute a single report as multiple, separate PDFs, where visualizations and key indicators are personalized to different target recipients based on selected filter values, bookmarks, and/or document properties. This ensures only the relevant data is shared with each stakeholder, without unnecessary information. This is enabled by the new ForEach Automation Services task. For example, a report developer can use the ForEach task to loop over a list of bookmarks, filtering the report data before export and then sending it to different email addresses.
More flexible repetition patterns are now supported for scheduling Automation Services jobs, including hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly options. Recurrence rules simplify event scheduling, improve efficiency, enhance consistency, and provide a structured approach to managing events.
Action mods follow the same development principles as visualization mods, with external source code control (e.g., GitHub) and modern IDEs (e.g., Visual Studio Code) offering syntax highlighting, code completion, and live debugging in Spotfire.
Distribution: Action mods can be distributed as mod files and shared through the Spotfire library.
Security: The security model is based on a trust mechanism and sandboxed execution.
API Access: Similar to IronPython scripts, Action mods use the comprehensive Spotfire API for accessing Spotfire analytic items and services.
Resources: For information on how to develop action mods, see the Spotfire Mods website on GitHub.
The new Web Player REST API allows an application to update a Spotfire Web Player analysis.
Documentation Reference: You can browse the API with the Swagger UI on your server: https://<spotfire-server>/spotfire/api/swagger-ui.html?urls.primaryName=web-player.
Development Stubs: Download the OAS (Open API Specification) for easy development of stubs in any language from: https://<spotfire-server>/spotfire/api/v2/api-docs?group=web-player.
Web UI and OAuth for Databricks and Apache Spark SQL: You can now use the web client to create and modify connections to Databricks and other Apache Spark SQL based data sources. The new web UI (also available in the installed client) allows for selecting OAuth2 as an authentication method (in addition to username/password and Windows authentication) for SSO and safe personalized login.
Custom Connection Properties: When needed, connections can be customized by using custom connection properties for data source or driver specific settings.
Note: Some connection authoring capabilities, such as configuring prompts, writing custom queries, and defining primary key columns, are only available when you use the installed client.
Better Library Search for Specific Mod Types: With the addition of action mods, you can no longer search for type:mod directly when searching the library. Instead, search for type:visualizationmod or type:actionmod, or use a wildcard character and search for type:*mod to find all mods.
More Options for Configuring Library Compression: Previously, library items were compressed based on a simple enabled/disabled configuration. Now, you can switch off compression of specific library types by configuring the multivalued property library.compressed-content.disabled-lib-types.type.
Updated My Account Page with More Functionality: The My Account page layout has been changed, moving different sections into separate tabs: Account information, Trusted signers and items, Manage logins, and Signatures.
Download Spotfire Windows Client: A "Downloads" tab is now available in the Spotfire Server UI where you can download the installer for a Spotfire client and connect it to a Spotfire Server[cite: 61]. Note: An administrator can remove the Downloads tab if desired.
TS-1-7174 Monthly, bi-weekly schedules for Automation Services
SPF-1-5096 Save JavaScript / IronPython scripts to library
SPF-1-4935 Better development support for IronPython scripts
TS-1-6645 Enable scripts to be "signed" or Certified so that authors do not have to TRUST every time.
TS-1-7809 Spotfire Automation Services - Extend scheduling / triggering capabilities matching Windows Task Scheduler
TS-1-6212 Full IDE for Iron Python Scripting in the Professional Client
TS-1-7569 Web Player Default View Mode To Editing
SPF-1-5156 Add Python scripting modules as a standard Add-in in the Automation services capabilities
TS-1-5593 Method/Tool to automatically update script and document property in multiple dashboard
TS-1-6379 Action Items as menu entries
TS-1-6121 Print Multiple PDF's from a single command
TS-1-7315 Add option for scheduling monthly automation services jobs
TS-1-7639 Add Intellisense to IronPython Script Editor
TS-1-7924 Hourly scheduling on automation job
TS-1-8093 Add "Repeat on every xx seconds/minutes/hours" option when scheduling AS job
TS-1-8213 Javascript and Ironpython library
TS-1-8905 IronPython Tasks in Automation Services
TS-1-9555 Include Custom Connector for Azure Databricks in Spotfire base install
TS-1-6367 Action Control: Ability to refresh one or more data tables using action control
TS-1-6955 Action Control functionality in the visualization title
TS-1-8190 Add cron syntax to automation services scheduler
TS-1-8926 Databricks connector to support OIDC / OAuth
TS-1-8979 Databricks connector available from the web client
TS-1-9327 Repeatedly run AS job in a day
TS-1-9542 User data / comments in the web-client
TS-1-9543 Add connection parameter for Apache Spark SQL connector
TS-1-7548 Support Iron Python scripts in TIBCO Cloud Spotfire web clients
TS-1-8700 Schedule AS job monthly