Data Functions:

Data Functions in Spotfire allows people to create scripts based on their custom logic for transforming data, adding feature to a visualization, or for establishing connection to database and so on. It maps the input to the output meaning it specifies what field/value to be used and which variable to assign it to. They are calculations based on S-PLUS, open-source R, SAS®, MATLAB® scripts*, R or python scripts.

In this blog, I will be providing detailed steps on the following:

How to install the libraries that is required for the data function.
Registering the data functions.
Data Function – Use Case

Installing the libraries required for the data function:

In TIBCO Spotfire, open Python tools from the Tools menu.

The dialogue box shown below will appear. You can enter the packages you need to install here. The search results will appear in the box below, which you can then install by clicking the Install button. We can install all the necessary packages and libraries in this manner.

Registering Data Function:

We can register a Data function by navigating to Register Data function option under the Tools menu as shown below:

Once we click on it, the below dialog box will appear.

Name – Enter the name of the Data function.

Type – The script language that you wish to use. In our case we will be using Python.

Packages – Mention the packages that you are going to use in the script separated by semicolon.

Description – You can mention the description to the Data function if required.

Script – Enter your Script here.

Input parameters – After clicking Add in the input parameters section, the dialogue box shown below will open where you may enter the input values and the data types you plan to input the program.

Output parameters – When we click Add in the output parameters area, the dialogue box below will display. Here, we can initialize the output and specify whether the output will be a value, table, or a column.

Once you have finished filling out all the fields, click Run to start the implementation. The dialogue box below will then appear.

Here there are two different methods in which you can feed in your input in the input tab.

Value – Used to specify the value of the input directly.
Document Property – Document properties can be used when you require the value of the input to be applicable throughout the document.

On the Output tab, you can mention the name of the data table as per your preference.

Data Function Use Case:

Here, I have used the FIFA 2020 Dataset to demonstrate the use case.

In the use case, I have created a data function – in order to import libraries (Pandas, NumPy), retrieve data from a csv file, execute data cleaning and manipulation tasks like removing null values, creating new columns and assigning the values to it based on predefined criteria, and creating calculated columns.

In this instance, I have not used an input parameter, but you are free to create one if you want to mention something that needs user input.

Additionally, I have defined one output parameter (as shown below) and specified the type as “Table” to return the data in the form of a table.

I was able to retrieve the result set by executing the above code after utilizing the existing data manipulation techniques.

The Data is currently ready for visualization!

This is how we can feed data into a data function and have it transformed to meet our requirements.

Thanks for reading!