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New Visualizations for Cognos Analytics in the Catalog - Aug 2020!

By Torben Noer posted Mon August 17, 2020 05:28 AM

  
Looking for a Parallel coordinate, Organizational Chart, Examples on using Google charts, echarts, Fusioncharts or Highcharts? Then take a look at the Accelerator Catalog!

In June we added a handful of custom visualization to support your needs for more visualizations out-of-the-box, ready-to-use - take a look here: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/businessanalytics/blogs/torben-noer1/2020/06/05/new-visualizations-in-cognos-analytics and we are back with 7 more samples... 

These are samples that are ready to use, but we also share the source code so you can modify them to support your needs... so download them, upload the zipfile to your R7 Cognos Analytics system and test them out... if you want to adjust them in any way, come back to the Accelerator Catalog and download the source code from the Github repository. The Parallel coordinate and Org chart are ready to use, whereas the 3. party integration charts more are meant as examples of how it could be done... but let's take a look...

Parallel coordinates:
 This visualization is very good for comparing multivariate, numerical data - either by having multiple KPI's as "columns" to see the trend for different dimensions or having values like years as "columns". But be careful, too much data would mean a very cluttered visualization ;-)
Below I'm comparing different HR KPI's from a survey with education level to quickly spot trends.
https://community.ibm.com/accelerators/catalog/content/Parallel-coordinates

Organizational chart:
Another request we often get is to show data for an organization - can we quickly spot some trends across an organization, which could also be a product hierarchy and other organized dimensions. In below example, I'm quickly displaying sales quota attainment to capture in what part of the organization we have a problem:
The nodes can be expand/collapse if you are working with a large hierarchy and with several properties, this can also be customized in several ways.
https://community.ibm.com/accelerators/catalog/content/Organization

3. party visualization engines:
The power of the custom visualization part of Cognos Analytics has always been that it's capable of integrating all kinds of JavaScript based visualizations! D3 is the largest collection of open source visualizations, that can be used without any cost - but the challenge with D3 is also that it comes without a structure... some might be easy to integrate, some can be very tricky. So sometimes it might be a better solution to go to one of the 3. party vendors like Google, EChart, Highcharts and Fusioncharts. Below are some examples of how it could be integrated. We have taken several properties and exposed them in the custom visualization, but there are many more out there so these more serves as guidance on how to integrate these engines. The benefit of these engines is that they come with a structure, so it's easy to take one of the samples and change it to another visualization from the same vendor.

Highchart Area:
This is a visualization that involves a cost! The sample can be used free of charge, but if it's used in production a Highchart license is necessary.
Highchart comes with a lot of properties and interactive functionality - only some of them have been enabled in the sample - take a look and play with it!

https://community.ibm.com/accelerators/catalog/content/Highchart-area

Fusionchart Pareto:
This is a visualization that involves a cost! The sample can be used free of charge, but if it's used in production a Fusionchart license is necessary.
Pareto is another requested visualization - it's possible to create with the updated line/column aka combination chart with R7, but here is another example of the Pareto visualization from Fusionchart. Pareto are used for focusing on the largest contributors to a KPI, with a cumulative percentage to guide. Below shows sales per region and I can quickly see top 80% countries. 

https://community.ibm.com/accelerators/catalog/content/FusionCharts-pareto


ECharts line:
ECharts are an Apache project, so free to use - https://echarts.apache.org/examples/en/
This library has a huge collection of visualization, so something for everyone! Like the other, this example shows only some of the properties as an example - more to add if needed. 
https://community.ibm.com/accelerators/catalog/content/Apache-ECharts-line


Google Histogram:
Google visualizations are also free to use, but read the license documentation.
Histograms are used for analyzing the distribution of data by grouping the numeric data into bins. This Google example and the next one shows how to integrate Google visualizations and expose the properties - it's very easy to change to another visualization or adding more properties.

https://community.ibm.com/accelerators/catalog/content/Google-histogram


Google Bar chart:
Last example - another one from Google, a simple Bar chart that can be changed to a line chart by changing 2 words in the code!


https://community.ibm.com/accelerators/catalog/content/Google-bar-chart

Business Partner visualization examples:
Lastly, we also have some examples on custom visualizations from our Business Partners!
Google Calender chart from PMsquare: https://community.ibm.com/accelerators/catalog/content/Customized-Google-calendar-chart
Google chart using conditional colors from Cognitech: https://community.ibm.com/accelerators/catalog/content/Customized-Google-column-chart
Route map from Intito: https://community.ibm.com/accelerators/catalog/content/Route-map

Finally - we welcome your inputs on what we should focus on for the next xx number of releases for the Accelerator Catalog - please share your thoughts below in the comment field

Torben



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