Me, Myself and MashZone

Posted by Martin Kallenborn

Posted on Tue, 02/09/2010 - 17:47 in MashZone

Within the next weeks, I would like to let you take part at my daily experiences with ARIS MashZone.

First Act: How everything started

I thought it was business as usual... I simply clicked on "Download MashZone" in my community profile without

thinking about the influence this decision would mean to my life.

After the short installation I copied my personal license key out of my community profile - and the adventure began.

The tutorial videos on www.mashzone.com/en/tutorials helped me to create my first mashup in a nutshell.

Everything was for free. Everything was so real. And I thought it couldn't change my life.

But I was wrong...

Second part: My first Mashapp

28.5k

by Edgars Stafeckis

Posted on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 12:59

Hi Martin!

Looking forward the continuation of your story! I'v tried several times to create my own mashups based on my own data feeds, but somehow i haven't succeeded yet. :(

Couldn't find the answers I was looking for in the tutorials...

One of the mashapps i tried to 'bake' was a line chart, respresenting data from a feed that takes EURIBOR 3M rates data from a .xls file placed on the internet (here's the link to it: http://bit.ly/bcFN2w). The feed seems to gather the information. Don't know what i'm doing wrong, but the line chart resists to display it in a mashapp...

BR,

Edgars

by Martin Kallenborn Author

Posted on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 15:58

Hi Edgars,

Thank you for your comment. I'll show you how I would do it.

First of all open the excel file and give the name "date" to the second row in the first column.

Then start a new MashApp and create a Time filter and a Line chart in the composer.

Now click on 'Assing Data' and create a new Data Feed. Choose your Excel file (http://bit.ly/bcFN2w) as Data Source.Take the column name from row 2 and import values from row 3. Then click on "Display calculation result" to see if everything is ok. It is important that the data types are set right. Otherwise change the data types via the operator "columns/Change data type".

Save your changes and go back to the Assign Data area. Connect the Data feed columns with the Line chart.

Then click on "Filter data" to connect the Time filter with your Line chart.

Select the Time filter and the data feed column "date" and set the condition "in selection" . Apply filter, save and close the assign data area.

Now you can use the Time filter to control the Line chart. If you want you can also add a legend to the line chart.

I hope this will help you.

Cheers,

Martin

by Stephan Freudl

Posted on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 08:31

Yes, indeed. It works exactly that way. ARIS MashZone even allows you to read the Excel sheet from the URL directly, i.e. you must not download and save it to disk manually. And MashZone will even receive update this way.

by Edgars Stafeckis

Posted on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 16:28

Martin - thank you very much! Your explanation is splendid and it helped me a lot indeed!

Although I encountered some unexpected 'obstacles' (like I had to change the data format, shorten the data row amount (with ARIS mash zone, you can have up to 1000 data rows observed in a data feed)), I made it through and now I have my first mashup!!! Yess!!! :)

I have to agree - in the end it really wasn't that complicated! Now I can't wait to add some other mashups and present it to my colleagues and friends!

Edgars