One of Spotfire's most powerful features is the access the platform gives frontend users to its application programming interface (API) through the programming language IronPython. API programming is typically the preserve of IT developers and usually occurs deep beneath the hood. Spotfire has made the API very accessible to all report developers and has integrated this into the everyday use of the platform. It's comparable to the use of VBA in Microsoft Excel.

To write API scripts, you need some programming experience and you also need to know how to use Spotfire's library of properties and methods, which is where this chapter will help you. Despite online reference documents and examples, it is a serious challenge to figure out how to do even quite simple tasks with the Spotfire API. This, unfortunately, is the downside of this otherwise wonderful facility. In this one chapter, you will learn things that might take you a year to figure out unaided,...