Render a hex colour in a column

[Paul Hickford 2]

Hi all,

I have a dataset and one of the columns that is feeding into it is a hex code for a colour, eg #9fdcc9.  I'm wondering if there is a way to make Spotfire intelligently understand these values as the colour they are meant as.  I know I could setup colouring for the columns with a set of rules (there are currently only a handful of colours) but before I embark on doing this manually was wondering if there is already an elegant solution.

Any ideas?

[Gaia Paolini]

I guess you could do it with an Iron Python script, but by far the easiest solution would be to create a custom colour scheme that you can then permanently assign to your column.
To do that you would first assign the corresponding colours to your variable, within a visualization (say a barchart).

To save it as a colour scheme: go to the icon shown in the screenshot, click on Save As > Document Color Scheme.

give it a name (e.g. hexColScheme)
then go to the column properties and assign it as a categorical colour scheme (type the exact name)

so the scheme is kept with the variable and every time you use that variable to colour, it will be used.

[Paul Hickford 2]

Yes, that's kind of what I was thinking.  As long as the users keep to a limited to set of entries I can just set up rules to match.  Probably trying to be too clever automating it from some source data.