Work with Explorer and Smart Insights in Analytic Applications

When you run an analytic application, you can launch explorer for a chart or table to select different dimensions and measures, experiment with filters and so on.

There are two ways to launch the explorer:

• Save and run the application. Select a chart or table for data exploration. From (More Actions) select (Open Explorer).

• Launch via script APIs that can also add additional dimensions and measures to the data exploration scope. For example:

  Sample Code

  //Add Travel_Date and Traveler dimensions to current dimension scope for data exploration.
  Chart_1.getDataSource().getDataExplorer().setAdditionalDimensions([“Travel_Date”, “Traveler”]);

  For more information about related APIs, refer to Analytics Designer API Reference.

In the facet panel of the explorer, you can change dimensions and measures to generate charts or tables for preview. You can also change chart types, show or hide elements and do sorting in tables, export the data to file and so on in the explorer. For related information, you can refer to Explore the Data in a Story Shared with You.

To be able to save a chart or table to a new story directly from the explorer, select the option Open in New Story in the section Quick Menus of the widget's Styling panel when designing the application. You'll then be able to select the icon in the explorer's visualization area and choose Open in New Story.

As an application designer, you can add custom menu items to explorer's visualization area to let application users apply the data exploration results to tables or charts, for example.

1. In the Scripting section of the Outline panel, select to the right of (Data Explorer Configuration) to add a scripting object.

   The Data Explorer Configuration panel is opened on the right side.

2. In this panel, add custom menu items in the Menu Settings.

3. Write script for the onMenuItemSelect() function of this DataExplorerConfiguration scripting object to define the activities you want to trigger when selecting these menu items.

   Sample Code

   Say you want to apply the explorer results of Chart_1 to another chart Chart_2. Write the scripts below:

   var explorer = Chart_1.getDataSource().getDataExplorer();
   if (Chart_2.isVisible() === false) {
       DataExplorerConfiguration_1.applyToWidget(Chart_2);
       Chart_2.setVisible(true);}

   Note

   Explorer results can only be applied to the same widget type.

   Carrying over all the show/hide settings in the explorer or the original widget's styling settings aren't supported.

4. Save and run the analytic application.

5. Select the icon in the explorer's visualization area and choose the menu item you’ve defined.

At last if you want to save the updated table or chart, you can bookmark the application or publish it to PDF.

Smart insights automatically discovers key insights, including correlations, exceptions, clusters, links and predictions of data, which brings you straight to the results instead of requiring time-consuming manual data exploration.

In analytic applications, smart insights is available only when explorer is enabled. Also make sure you've selected Smart Insights in the Quick Menus section of the Styling panel of the corresponding chart or table widgets.

In both application view and explorer view, you can trigger smart insights by selecting a data point in a chart or a data cell in a table and then (Smart Insights) in its context menu.

Furthermore, you can continue to run smart insights or explorer with the generated data in the Smart Insights panel. You can also create a story based on the visualization generated there if you've enabled Open in New Story in the original widget's styling panel.