How to assign data types when loading data files in TIBCO Spotfire

How to assign data types when loading data files in TIBCO Spotfire

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Article ID: KB0072358

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Updated On:

Products Versions
Spotfire Analyst All
TIBCO Cloud Spotfire All

Description

When opening a file in TIBCO Spotfire Analyst and other installed clients, the program looks at the first 100 rows to automatically determine the data type for each column (Integer, Real, String, Date, etc).  But in situations where there is very sparse data (no values in first 100 row sample) or the first 100 rows is not a fully representative set of data (the first 100 rows have integers, but there are strings in later rows) then some columns might be assigned an incorrect or undesired data type. 

Issue/Introduction

This article explains how to assign data types to each column when opening data files (.csv, .xlsx, etc) in TIBCO Spotfire

Environment

All

Resolution

To avoid having to set each column's data type manually during the import process, you can add the data type as a new row in the data file.  For example, see the 2nd row: 
 Col1,Col2,Col3 string,real,integer abd,2,3 ,, ,3,1 5,,
When the data is being added to Spotfire, this will then be used as the "Type row" which will determine which data type the column will be in Spotfire:
User-added image

Note that if there is a need to assign data types but the method described above is not applicable, one other option could be to use a Change Data Types Transformation. For more information on that, see the manual:  https://docs.tibco.com/pub/sfire-analyst/11.4.0/doc/html/en-US/TIB_sfire-analyst_UsersGuide/data/data_details_on_change_data_type.htm    

 

Additional Information

Doc: Details on Import Settings Doc: Details on Change Data Types
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