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Tag Archives: JSON


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Alteryx: Spatial Data Output (GeoJSON)

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Continuing the series prototyping HTML based visualizations, I want to look at spatial data.  One of the strengths of Alteryx is that spatial data is just data.  It doesn’t claim to be a GIS product, it just assumes that every organization has spatial data and would like to process it with the rest of their data and specifically they don’t want to have to use multiple products to do it.

So far in my prototype I have ignored spatial data.  Clearly if we decide to add new visualization features in Alteryx, spatial needs to be a 1st class part of it.  Since this prototype is entirely based on HTML and JavaScript, we need to start with what spatial data looks like in that environment.  Fortunately, there is already a standard for spatial data in JSON: GeoJSON.

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Alteryx: HTML5 Visualizations

4ffdaf0d245ff2ea4a089507d3b99c1eLast week I introduced potentially new visualizations for Alteryx based on HTML5 and its associated parts like JavaScript and SVG.  I started with a macro to write JSON data files from Alteryx.  This week I continue the prototype with a macro to actually render HTML 5 into an Alteryx report.

Skipping to the end of the story, on the left is a chart created using nvd3 in Alteryx.  I found some nice sample data for visualizing from the world bank showing the GDP of every country (and region) in the world since 1960.  The selected data I chose to show is the top 10 countries by GDP since 1980 – the data before then seems to be lacking in some detail.  I show the data as a stacked bar chart, which means that the top line is the total GDP for all 10 countries with each country’s part of the total shown by the height of a specific color. Continue reading →


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Alteryx: JSON Data Output

I am working on a prototype for Alteryx of some new charting/visualization ideas.  For most prototypes we do the audience would be strictly internal, but this time I am going to try something different.  As I move forward developing the prototype, I am going to be sharing it with the readers of this blog in order to get as much feedback as I can as early as possible in the process.  The idea is to use JavaScript & SVG for visualization/charting from within Alteryx.  We could of course extend the charting tool we have, but there is a lot of energy in the open source world right now going on with JavaScript visualization.  We want to evaluate the idea of utilizing some of the work that other people are doing – otherwise known as standing on the shoulders of giants.  Some of the specific libraries we are looking at include:  D3, NVD3 and RAW.  There are many, many others, so if we were to integrate a JavaScript engine in a generic way, we could open up Alteryx to all kinds of cool things. Continue reading →