Vertical column bars not displayed (where line chart works)

Hi Sam,

Thanks for reaching out. I'm unable to replicate this behavior:

Can you please re-replicate by getting to the point where you're loading the charts and not seeing any output, take note of that timestamp, then subsequently provide a compressed copy of your entire logs folder, located at <YellowfinInstall>/appserver/logs, along with said timestamp, so we can investigate further? If the logs file is too large you can upload it to our FTP site here: https://ftp.yellowfin.bi/

Thanks,

Mike

I just uploaded the .zip of my full logs folder, see the timestamp of 12:53-12:54 (up until activity ends at 12:54) - it looks like the only file that changed yesterday was localhost_access_log.2021-02-24.txt.

Thinking of possible contributing factors to this behavior:

• The data source is a .csv
• The column being plotted starts off as a text value because it's a mix of numerics and text values like "A+"
• Then it's used to create a numeric variable that is the one plotted, via the Freehand SQL command
  

  CAST("Finance KPI Data.csv"."f164231value" AS NUMERIC(10,10))

  
  

Hi Sam,

I meant to look at this further today but I had something come up. I will set up a use case that more closely mirrors yours first thing tomorrow and give you another update.

Regards,

Mike

Hi Sam,

I imported a CSV data set with varchar values, but I'm unsure how you're able to cast varchar data as numeric. I tried in MySQL and SQL Server and both give errors. SQL Server indicates that you can't cast varchar values to numeric and in MySQL I can cast to decimal but it changes everything to 0's or 1's and isn't recognized as a Metric field:

Original data:

What RDBMS did you import the CSV into where you're subsequently executing the CAST statement against?

Regards,

Mike

Thanks for your continued investigation. The .csv was imported into Microsoft SQL Server 14.00.3370.

It looks like this in the CSV view (see the rightmost column):

Maybe what makes it work is that on the Data view, I have a filter for Metric Equal To "Retirement Plan Funding". Which only has numeric values of Value, that filtering excludes the A+ text values. Does your CAST() succeed if you add that filter to another column?

Here's the cast:

And then the result:

Hi Sam,

I wasn't able to get this replicated in the same exact way, what I did instead was use a CASE statement to make non numeric values null, then the rest would be returned as numbers:

This was my initial result in the Charts... a blank auto-chart:

And if I switched to Column Chart, an actual error appeared:

Turns out though, that YF doesn't like this data unaggregated.

If I set my data to a Sum Aggregation (Note: this has to be done in the Data section, not the Charts section):

You can see data is now generated:

As you can see, my number data itself also doesn't change when aggregating in this case, so I'm thinking you should be able to do this as well.

As such, can you attempt adding an aggregation to your Metric in the Data section and re-adding it in the Charts section and seeing if the Chart then generates?

Please let me know how goes. If this doesn't work please let me know if the behavior changes at all - something different in logs, an error message in the UI, etc..

Thanks,

Mike

I appear to have solved this, we were barking up the wrong tree. The column chart appears completely blank as seen in the screenshot I originally posted. But if I mouseover a year, I see it highlight:

Revealing that there are columns there, they're just so thin they're invisible. It turns out the Date variable has defaulted to formatting of Units = Milliseconds. When I switch that to Units = Year, I get the chart as I expected it.

I'll change the variable settings on my end but in case this affects others, I'd suggest a feature that if there are columns present, they not be able to be so thin that they're invisible - especially by default.

Thanks for diving into this - this ticket can be closed.

Hi Sam,

That's bizarre. I have to say that's something I've not seen before, but thanks for letting us know what happened here! I'll certainly keep this in mind for the future.

I'll indeed go ahead and close this out now that this is sorted, but please don't hesitate to reach out with any other questions or concerns.

Regards,

Mike