Spotfire 14.1 introduces a new unified visualization authoring experience (in preview) and enhancements for analysts, web authors, developers and administrators. Some of the key enhancements include engineering notation for numbers formatting, support for IronPython 3.4 scripts, Google Cloud SQL Server supported as Spotfire Server DB, and a new panel for managing filtering schemes.

To return to the What's New in Spotfire page for all releases, click here.

Data Wrangling

Add binned column from data canvas

Analysts and report developers using the installed Spotfire client can add binned columns to data tables directly from the final data table node in the data canvas. This enhancement adds a quicker access point for grouping a number of more or less continuous values into a smaller number of 'bins'.

Use engineering notation to format numbers

Using engineering notation when formatting numbers simplifies the presentation of numeric values in alignment with engineering standards, and helps enhancing data comprehension and communication in technical fields. This feature, available under the Scientific format in the column formatting settings, displays the exponent of 10 expressed as a multiple of three.

Visual Analytics

Filtering schemes panel

The new Filtering schemes panel enables adding, editing, and removing filtering schemes both in the installed client and the web client. Now you can quickly see the number of pages and visualizations limited by a specific filtering scheme and directly jump to a page or visualization.


The filtering schemes functionality is a powerful feature that allows you to save and apply predefined combinations of filters to quickly switch between different data views and enhance and facilitate dynamic data exploration. You can use different filtering schemes across various analysis pages and ensure that specific visualizations remain unaffected by changes in other visualizations.

In Preview - The new visualization properties experience

The new visualization properties panel makes visualization authoring easier, more efficient, and unifies the experience in the web client and the installed client.

• Easy to use: All properties have one consistent design across all visualization types. The panel only shows properties that are applied to the selected visualizations. Simply add more properties to enrich visualizations.
• Searchable: Just use search to find properties and settings to edit or add.
• Efficient: Configure multiple selected visualizations simultaneously. Reuse configurations across visualizations through drag and drop.
• Scalable: The new panel is designed for scale and will allow Spotfire to be extended with more visualization capabilities in the future.

Analysts can try out this new experience in the web client and the installed client. Not all visualization properties are available in the panel, and not all functionality from the old properties dialog have been implemented yet. The old properties dialog remains available and can be used side-by-side with the new experience.

How to enable the new experience

As an administrator, head to Tools > Administration Manager > Preferences in the latest version of the Spotfire Analyst client and set the EnableVisualizationPropertiesPanel preference to True. Then reload the web client or restart the installed client. The old properties dialog remains available and can be used side-by-side with the new experience.

Developers

Support for IronPython 3.4

Scripting in Spotfire analyses has been updated to support IronPython 3.4.1, the latest version of IronPython based on Python 3.4.



The support for older versions (2.0 and 2.7) is kept for backwards compatibility, but can be disabled by the administrator.

Administration

Google Cloud SQL for SQL Server as Spotfire DB

Spotfire now supports Google Cloud SQL for SQL Server as the Spotfire Server database.



This last addition enables you to choose from any of the three major databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server) for on-premises deployments or for use as database service available on any of the three major cloud service providers (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud).

Support for OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server Issuer Identification

Spotfire Server now supports RFC 9207 (OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server Issuer Identification), when acting as a client (when fetching data or similar) and when acting as an authorization server (towards public API clients and similar).

RFC 9207 specifies a new parameter called iss. This parameter is used to explicitly include the issuer identifier of the authorization server in the authorization response of an OAuth authorization flow. The iss parameter serves as an effective defense mechanism to "mix-up attacks", when an OAuth client can interact with more than one authorization server.

RFC 9207 is a recommendation part of the IETF's draft: OAuth 2.0 Security Best Current Practice.

New command for deleting configurations

The new CLI command delete-config allows to delete configurations in the server database.
Example: config delete-config -h 62db58d

Note: The current configuration cannot be deleted.

Support for chained token credentials for Azure authentication for Azure Blob Storage

When using Azure Blob Storage as the external storage of the Spotfire library items, you can delegate authentication to DefaultAzureCredential, which will attempt to authenticate via the following mechanisms in the following order:

1. EnvironmentCredential
2. WorkloadIdentityCredential
3. IntelliJCredential
4. AzureCliCredential

For more information, see the Spring Cloud Azure authentication.

Note: The DefaultAzureCredential is appropriate for most scenarios where the application is intended to be run in the Azure Cloud. This is because the DefaultAzureCredential combines credentials commonly used to authenticate when deployed with credentials used to authenticate in a development environment.