Enabling end users to configure the KPI chart interactively

Imagine the following scenario: you've just configured a KPI chart showing Avg(close)—well, that's exactly what you've done right now, so it shouldn't be too hard to tax your imagination! Then, you want to publish the KPI chart to others in your organization. The trouble is, it may not meet the needs of others.

What if they are interested in the average opening price of the stock instead of the closing price? What if they want the sum rather than the average? All these options would show different pictures of the data, and we can't expect every user of a Spotfire chart to go digging into its settings in order to change what's shown on an axis.

Fortunately, Spotfire has an easy way of adding controls and customization to visualizations. Discussing these will introduce a number of important Spotfire concepts, so I'll discuss them briefly first to give you some background and then pull them together in an example.