Transform Data Using Data Accessors

This applies to: Visual Data Discovery

When working with charting libraries, it is often necessary to structure your data elements in a way the charting libraries understand.

For instance, given the following structure of data element received from the server:

{
  "group": ["$0 to $25,000"],
  "current": {
    "count": 400,
    "metrics": {
      "price": {
        "sum": 52150
      }
    }
  }
}

You may need to transform it to:

{
  "name": "$0 to $25,000",
  "value": "52150"}

We are interested in the values specified in the group array and the metric value defined in price.sum. You may be inclined to create a new data array by mapping each data element to the necessary structure like:

var newData = data.map(function(d) {
  return {
    name: d.group[0],
    value: d.current.metrics.price.sum,
  };
});

The downside of this approach is that you have now hardcoded the paths of your metric values to a specific field name (“price”) and a specific aggregation function (“sum”).

A Better Approach Using Data Accessors

A Data Accessor is an object with methods that can be used to extract information about the current configuration of query variables. A data accessor can also extract data values out of the data elements received from query execution results.

Example:

var groupAccessor = controller.dataAccessors['Group By'];
var metricAccessor = controller.dataAccessors.Metric;

var newData = data.map(function(d) {
  return {
    name: groupAccessor.raw(d),
    value: metricAccessor.raw(d),
  };
});

To access a data accessor, use the controller.dataAccessors object. The query variable’s name exists as property in this object. The most commonly used method in data accessors is raw which accepts a Symphony data element and returns a value corresponding to the query variable. In the above example, we used the groupAccessor and metricAccessor to retrieve the group and metric values without hard-coding the name of the fields.