TERR Console in Spotfire?
Hi all, I hope someone can help.
Basically, when I write R scripts I like to add in print statements to know where I am, for example if I'm looping through millions of elements in a list, I like to do something along the lines of:
for (i in length(1:someVector)) {
print (someVector[i])
doSomething(vector[i])
}
But of course the print statements do not show anywhere on Spotfire when I run the above as a data function, does anyone have any idea how I could maybe bring up a console that can show console output to the user? If that's not possible, is there any other way of showing the user print statements?
Thanks!
(2) Answers
If you are using an earlier version of Spotfire that has a built-in local TERR engine but no "Tools > TERR Tools" menu selection, you can use Windows Explorer to navigate to the folder that contains the Spotfire desktop client's "TERR.exe" executable file, then double-click on the "TERR.exe" file to launch a TERR Console session.
The following is the Windows path to the "TERR.exe" file in a Spotfire 7.0.1 instance, for example:
C:\Program Files\TIBCO\Spotfire\7.0.1\Modules\TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R_4.3.0\engine\bin
Part of this path uses hidden folders, so you may need to adjust the options for your Windows Explorer display to make hidden folders visible.
In all supported versions of the Spotfire Analyst desktop client (Spotfire 7.0 and later), the following selection from the main menu will open a TERR Console session using the Spotfire desktop client's built-in TERR engine (with the same optional R packages installed as are available for the data function's use):
Tools > TERR Tools > Launch TERR Console
To make your Spotfire data function's input data table(s) available for use in the TERR Console session, you can export each data table to a Spotfire Binary Data Format (SBDF) file, then import the data into your TERR Console session at the beginning of your test script.
For example, if my laptop has a "C:\data" folder and my Spotfire data function uses a data table named "TestData" as an input parameter, I can select the following sequence from the main menu, and browse to the "C:\data" folder to save the data table in an SBDF file named "TestData.sbdf":
File > Export > Data to File > Data Table > All rows > OK > Save as type "TIBCO Spotfire Binary Data Format (*.sbdf)"
Then I can use the following command to import the data into my TERR Console session for use in testing commands from the data function's TERR script:
TestData <- SpotfireData::importDataFromSBDF( "c:/data/TestData.sbdf" )
Note that R and TERR use the slash ("/") as a path separator, even on Windows. A single backslash ("\") will not work.