Spotfire® Mods

You can now build new visualization types, called visualization mods, and use them in Spotfire like any other visualization. A Spotfire visualization mod is a lightweight, shareable, and reusable visualization component that is built with web technologies such as JavaScript and HTML and runs in a sandboxed iframe. By connecting to any Spotfire data source and integrating with data science and other built-in Spotfire capabilities, you can create highly customized analytic applications directly within the Spotfire environment. Developers have access to the Spotfire Mods API, which grants access to the Spotfire data and other functionality. It is based on TypeScript, which enables syntax highlighting and code completion in the editor. You can integrate any third-party JavaScript libraries with your mod to handle the graphics or help speed up the development. Spotfire visualization mods look, feel, and behave like native Spotfire visualizations, and can be used without any knowledge of how they were implemented. A visualization mod is highly configurable to be reused in different analyses with different data. The configuration of a mod’s data view and appearance is done with drag-drop or direct manipulation with built-in UIs. The user has access to the standard axis selectors supporting the full Spotfire expression language. Mod-specific settings can be exposed through a popup panel or using a custom UI. Standard visualization properties, such as settings for data, appearance, colors, and subsets are available as well. A visualization mod is automatically responsive to events that occur in other parts of Spotfire, for example, filtering, marking, highlighting. Built-in Spotfire capabilities such as actions on marked data, exporting to PDF, maximizing the visualization view, creating details visualizations, and changing the visual theme, work as usual. To share a mod with others, you can embed it in a Spotfire analysis and share the analysis, or save the mod itself to the Spotfire library, where others who have the right permissions can find it by browsing or searching for it from the Visualizations flyout. You can also share a separate .mod file via email, file shares, or public websites, such as the Community. On the Community Exchange, several visualization mods are available for download. Saving visualization mods to the Spotfire library allows users to pin mods to the Visualizations flyout. A pinned mod is available to be used in other analyses and the mod will be included as an option whenever you select visualization type. Pinning mods to the visualization flyout can also be centrally managed. An administrator can specify a collection of mods that the users will have access to. Another benefit of sharing a visualization mod in the Spotfire library is that you will get automatic version handling of the mod. By default, if a visualization mod is re-saved to the Spotfire library, all instances of the visualization mod are updated in all analyses, where it is used. To deploy a visualization mod into the Spotfire environment, you can drag and drop a .mod file to your open analysis session. An administrator can deploy and share a mod to a group of users. Running a mod involves code execution. Therefore, a concept of code trust has been introduced in the Spotfire environment. This code trust includes three different options:

• a user can trust a specific version of a mod.
• a specific mod can be trusted because it is signed, using cryptographic signatures, by a specific Spotfire user.
• a specific mod can be trusted because it is signed by a certificate issued by a trusted certificate authority.

When a mod has been signed, any further changes to the mod code will change the hash sum of the mod and there will be a mismatch with what was signed, so any attempts to change the code by a third party should be detectable. See Trusting custom content in the Spotfire environment for more information about trust in general.