Dashboarding made prettier: Table widget cell formatting enhancements

Body

The next DASH version, scheduled for May 2015 (in JazzSM 1.1.2), includes an enhancement to the Table and Tree Table widgets that allows the page author to format the content of numeric data columns.

The following use case scenarios will now be possible:

Simple Formatting

• Format numbers to have 2 decimal places and be right aligned.  Eg: |     20.45|

• Format numbers to display as an integer, be centered, and include units text.  Eg: |   20 m   |

Advanced Conditional Formatting

• Format numbers to have 1 decimal place, right aligned.  Conditionally color the text based on the current value: red when > 90, yellow when > 75,  green otherwise
• Format numbers plus use cell's background color to highlight special conditions
• Map current value to one of n icons

The following screen captures give you a taste of what will be possible:

The page author can now choose from no formatting or one of the new formatting modes on a column-by-column basis:

"Custom" Mode (left screen capture above)

• Text Styling:
  • Text attributes: normal | bold | italic, color, size
  • Cell attributes: background color, alignment (left | center | right)
• Number formatting:
  • 0..4 decimal places
• Suffix text:
  • describe units, help with indentation from left/right edge, etc
• Conditions:
  • allow different styling combinations based on current value
  • similar to other widget's thresholds

"Map to Icons" Mode (right screen capture above)

• Value mapped to one of a set of icons
• Icon options:
  • Icon only
  • Icon and value (0..4 decimal places)
• Conditions:
  • Allow different icon, size, and tooltip based on current value
  • Flexible Icon sourcing
    • Set of built-in icons
    • External icon via URL (symbiotic with myBox)

These exciting formatting capabilities provide page authors more tools for building better, prettier DASH pages to meet their business needs. This in turn helps page viewers to consume large information faster and easier.