How to recreate ManyEyes Visualisations

[briancole]

Hi All,

I've been playing with the ManyEyes website while I've been waiting for our system to be upgraded to 10.2.1 and really liked some of the visualisations on there, particularly the treemap visualisation. I created this on the ManyEyes website:

http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/issues-by-group

And now I'm upgraded to 10.2.1 I'm trying to recreate the visualisation as an Active Report in Report Studio, but I can't seem to get anywhere near the same level of functionality as the report on the ManyEyes site. Specifically:

• The search box
• Selecting a box and it highlighting in yellow
• Right-click to zoom in/out
• Dynamically changing the ordering of the categories in the bar at the top

Is this something that will require me to extensively edit the RAVE JSON files I downloaded from the AnalyticsZone? If so, I feel a bit mislead as the ManyEyes and IBM main sites make this functionality appear simple and standard?

Can anyone offer any help in order to reproduce this functionality, as at the moment I have a basic treemap that I can do the basics with (e.g. filter) with some active controls, but that's miles away from a GUI to swap categories and search.

Thanks,
Brian

[MFGF]

Hi Brian,

The functionality you are describing is coded into the visualization, so to reproduce it you will need to edit the json file in the vizbundle of the standard treemap and replicate the same functionality. There is a rudimentary editor on Analyticszone you can use, but it's not a simple task to do, sadly. Did you code the original treemap on ManyEyes from scratch? If so I imagine you will be able to lift a lot of the code from there?

Cheers!

MF.

[briancole]

Hi MF,

Thanks for the reply. I have been looking into the JSON file, but as far as I can tell (based upon my current understanding) all that seems editable is things like theformatting the input data and controlling font size\colour and the colour palette for the chart. Am I right in my understanding that JSON is not an actual language and is simply a way of feeding data into an object? Therefore I cannot see any way of changing the appearance of the visualisation to add in search boxes and drag-to-reorder areas using JSON?

I've been looking at various tutorials on how to create visualisations, but these tend to rely on Javascript libraries such as D3 or JQuery. From what I've read, Cognos appears to use a library called RAVE, but I can't find anything on what language RAVE uses, or where to edit it.

At the moment, I have simply downloaded the current example of a TreeMap Colour by Category from the Analytics Zone, and I have read through the XML and JSON files included in the vizbundle, but the only code I can see which references which chart is displayed is:

Code Select Expand

<chartTypeDefinition name="vis.sample.treemap.colorbycategory" adapter="com.ibm.cognos.adapters.rave.RAVEChartAdapter" definitionVersion="1" adapterVersion="1" xmlns="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/ba/visBundle/chartTypeDefinition.1/">

There is probably something missing in my understanding that I'm not quite grasping at the minute, so if can help it would be appreciated! If you have an example of how to modify the visualisation even to just add in a text box or something, that would be immensely helpful!

Thanks,
Brian

[MFGF]

Hi Brian,

I don't have the skills to do this, sorry. Your signature refers to NHS so I'm guessing you are based in the UK? I think your best option is to contact your IBM technical resource (perhaps via your account manager) and get them to pass a request for a customised tree map along to a member of the Tiger Team.

Cheers!

MF.

[David Goddard]

Hi,

IBM RAVE Tiger Team person here  :)

I absolutely agree with MFGF's advice to speak to a member of your IBM technical team - they can definitely help.  However, just to answer a few of the points in this thread...

A RAVE visualisation is defined entirely by the JSON while, which contains both the data for the visualisation and the instructions for rendering it (which we refer to as the 'grammar').  In a RAVE bundle used by Cognos, there are other resources such as the XML file - these exist to integrate the visulisation into Cognos (specifying label text within Report Studio and so on).

When you run a RAVE visualisation from a Cognos report, the contents of the data part of the JSON are not used - instead the data from the associated Cognos query/queries are used.

The grammar section of the JSON tells the RAVE engine how to render the visualisation.  For example, in the case of the tree chart, the 'positioning' element has a 'layout' property of 'pivotBySize', which renders the data in a tree chart arrangement.  As well as basic chart appearance, labels, tooltips, colours etc. are all defined by elements in the JSON.  Unfortunately as far as I am aware, the detailed documentation for the RAVE JSON is not currently published.  However, the IBM Analytics Zone site also contains the Vizualisation Customizer tool (https://www.analyticszone.com/homepage/web/displayMarketplacePage.action#catalog/assets_viscustomizer), which includes documentation explaining many of the concepts, as well as helping you work directly with RAVE bundles.

Several of the things that you mention in your post are in fact properties of the Many Eyes engine, such as the search box and reordering of items.  Many Eyes is taking the data that you have provided and changing the grammar and/or data for the visualisation based on the selections that you have made.  For example, if you change the order of the hierarchy, Many Eyes changes the order of the data references in the 'levels' property of the 'positioning' element in the JSON (which then dynamically updates the visualisation).  Some of these effects you can relatively easily recreate in the Cognos report containing the visualisation (for example using prompting to change data items), while others would be harder.  As integration develops, more will become possible/easy to do directly within Cognos.

I hope this helps.

Dave

[MFGF]

Thanks for this great info Dave. It's hugely appreciated!!

MF.

[briancole]

Excellent, thank you for the reply. The key thing for me was to understand whether it was possible to have that functionality in the RAVE visualisation or not, so I knew where to focus my efforts. Knowing that this is now unique to the ManyEyes site, and that the visualisation is controlled "externally" so to speak, means that I can now focus my efforts on a similar approach and know that I'm not missing something key to understanding how the RAVE visalisations work.

I will certainly be contacting our IBM Technical Team to get some help with developing something with similar functionality to the ManyEyes implementation as those extra features take the visualisation to an extra level of interactivity which really appeals to our users.

Thanks again to both MF and Dave for your input on this :)

[charon]

I'm a bit late to the Rave-Party, but ive been searchin a lot lately to get these informations. So thx a lot to Dave and Mfgf for your statements  :D