Spotfire: Dynamically Hide and Show Controls in the Text Area Using IronPython Scripting

The following is a simple way to hide and show text area controls to allow a more dynamic way to handle input. One caveat is that the hidden control will still occupy a certain amount of space in the area, hidden or not

#Please note, this article may contain incorrect URLs due to the Spotfire Community migration.

Introduction

 <SpotfireControlid="715d19d1264845b38a51a2cf29e67730" />

Each control needs to be wrapped in a tag that allows using a hide property (default to visible).

 <div style="visibility: visible;"><SpotfireControlid="715d19d1264845b38a51a2cf29e67730" /></div>

A user can modify the HtmlTextArea HtmlContent dynamically without losing the Spotfire controls. This example only uses a very simple replace scheme to change the area. More advanced solutions using parsing and regular expressions would probably be a better idea in most cases, especially if multiple hidden controls are used.

Code Sample

 # Code to replace the visibility property:
 from Spotfire.Dxp.Application.Visuals import HtmlTextArea
 
 for vis in Document.ActivePageReference.Visuals:
     if vis.Title == 'Text Area':
         html = vis.As[HtmlTextArea]().HtmlContent
         
         if 'hidden' in html:
             vis.As[HtmlTextArea]().HtmlContent = html.Replace('hidden','visible')
         else:
             vis.As[HtmlTextArea]().HtmlContent = html.Replace('visible','hidden')