Spotfire类别

Question

I have a set of data from a python script I need to put into spotfire (it's movement data of machines) and I have trouble with consistently getting spotfire to recognize the relevant numbers as numbers, rather than as a different categorization, say "categories" in the left side data box. Here's a sample of the data:

    Id            Name     Date          X        Y       Z       Lat        Long
04a3169a302f    Trukki  28.3.2018 8:48  0.03522 0.03089 14.88   60.4   26.94
 04a3169a302f   Trukki  28.3.2018 8:48  0.03526 0.03153 15.52   0.64    60.47   26.94

The X, Y and Z data should be read as numbers (I think) but I often do not always get the option to select them as such. I don't know if this is cos of the source data (csv files) but I suspect it's whether they are integers or long integers. Usually they come in as type string and they can't later be changed to numbers and that effects how I can manipulate the data

If someone could point me to tutorial of how spotfire categorizes data (identifiers, location, time, numbers, etc) it would really help.

I hope this is clear. Help appreciated.

Answer 1

My understanding is that Spotfire looks at the first several (not sure of the exact number) observations in each column and tries to guess the data type. It will end up guessing string if there is a single observation of any kind of word in this set of observations.

For example, if my csv looks like:

Id,Name,Date,X,Y,Z,Lat,Long
04a3169a302f,Trukki,28.3.2018 8:48,0.03522,0.03089,14.88,60.4,26.94
04a3169a302f,Trukki,28.3.2018 8:48,0.03526,0.03153,15.52,0.64,60.47
04a3169a302f,Trukki,28.3.2018 8:48,NULL,0.03153,15.52,0.64,60.47

then Spotfire will guess string as the datatype for the X field. Note that I removed the 26.94 at the end of your sample data as it did not seem to belong.

Another possibility is if there is a comma in the Name column, this could offset your data and cause the Date field's data to be shifted over by one, which is also read in as a string. Thus the X field would be read in as a string as well.