asked on December 11, 2023
Hello,
We have an issue where users sometimes make a poor implementation of our software resulting in FlexMonster receiving a report with lots of rows where the measure values may be null, but some metadata they added is not.
Usually this is not an issue as the user can clearly see in the grid that they have generated a lot of rows they perhaps did not intend to. In these cases, they usually revisit their data input and fix it.
However, when show empty values is off, this visual feedback is not present. This is not an issue, but when FlexMonster initially loads it may spend a large amount of time "treating" these null values only to hide them. Users are not necessarily aware of this and we receive reports that they believe it is a performance deficiency with our software.
Of course this is not FlexMonster's fault, it's poor data management from the users. But we experience it does bother them, so we want to implement logic that informs the user when a large degree of their data-set is hidden (e.g. something like 50% of all cells are not shown). With this, the user may want to investigate their data.
However, we can't find a feasible way to get the information of how many cells/rows/columns showEmptyValues affects. At the basest level, what we need is some way to gauge how much data is given to FlexMonster and how much is actually used for the grid. So far, we have found no way to do this that does not incur a significant performance penalty. We want to ask if you guys have any ideas.
Br
Jonas
⋅ December 12, 2023
Hello, Jonas!
Thank you for your question.
Kindly note that Flexmonster's main focus is on data visualization. Hence, our component does not provide features intended for such a data validation. We recommend implementing this functionality outside of Flexmonster's API scope.
Hope you will find our reply helpful.
Best Regards,
Maksym
⋅ December 13, 2023
Hello Maksym,
I completely get your hesitation, with that said implementing such a rigorous data validation on our end is going to be extremely expensive. We are not necessarily asking for data validation from FlexMonster. Simply the count of rows affected by the "showEmptyValues" setting being disabled. Nothing more than a single number.
I believe that, logically, this data must exist internally in FlexMonster - so it would be a great help if we can get it in any way so we don't have to do the exact same analysis FlexMonster already does (thereby doubling the expense of this operation). We consider this somewhat related to data visualization as it is a conditional hiding/showing of data, not too dissimilar to the TableSizesObject.
The actual data validation would entirely be our responsibility. We just want a simple row/column count (if possible)
As always, thank you for your diligent help.
Br
Jonas
⋅ December 13, 2023
Hello, Jonas!
Thank you for the detailed response and explanation of your use case.
We understand your request, but at the same time, we want to explain that the showEmptyValues feature only affects the visual data representation layer. This means that the current implementation does not store variables containing the amount of empty and non-empty values or members. Therefore, we kindly suggest tracking the described data changes at the data level instead of the visualization level.
Feel free to reach out to us if any other questions arise.
Best Regards,
Maksym
