Ray Light's dashboard

Hi Gil,

Thank you for your feedback. While most of the application works quite well in Safari, it is still not an officially supported browser. Browsers currently supported are:

Firefox 2
Firefox 3
Internet Explorer 6
Internet Explorer 7

(IE 8 support is coming soon!)

Thanks,
Ray

Thanks for reporting this! I will look into this and try to get this fixed right away!

As of just a few hours ago, it should be possible to map multiple date fields to a date dimension. However, this capability is limited to the data management section, and currently not available during data upload.

Once the data is uploaded, you can open the date attribute's properties page, and map it to the provided time dimension. Each successive mapping wil essentially create a new hierarchy of dates based on the name of the original attribute.

I'd be happy to get on a call and show this to you or hear about your other concerns if I am missing something here. Just let me know if this would interest you, and we can make it happen.

Thanks,
Ray
support@gooddata.com
(415) 200-0194

Just an update here... today we released an update to the application that now allows mapping multiple dates.

The trick to this is to perform the mapping from the data management portion of the application (Data tab) and mapping each date to a date field. The application will then make new date hierarchies for each date (ie, Start Date or End Date >> Start Date Month, Start Date Year, etc).

Additional note regarding date labels in the application:

"Date" = yyyy-mm-dd
"Date US" = mm/dd/yyyy

(we will update this to make it clear!)

We will be supporting some basic date arithmetic, namely to provide trailing period reports (ie, last 3 days, week, month quarter, year, etc).

However, we realize that this is still lacking. Creating metrics based on date arithmetic is a feature we are working on implementing. Currently, there are some lengthy workarounds that we hope to change soon.At this point, I can't give an exact date as to when this feature will be implemented, but we are working to making it happen!

Thanks for your patience in this matter, and if you have any other questions, please feel free to let us know.

First, apologies for your trouble. This is clearly a bug, and I will log it and hopefully get this resolved as soon as possible. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your feedback. Currently, our UI cannot handle single files containing multiple dates. This is a known problem, and I'm happy to let you know that we are releasing an update in the next 1-2 weeks that addresses this issue in the UI and will allow you to map multiple dates to the time dimension.

In the meantime, we would be happy to help set this up for you. If you would like more information, please contact me and we can discuss your needs.

Thanks!
Ray

support@gooddata.com
(415) 200-0194

Hi Marion,

Thanks for this feedback. I spoke with someone in the office about this and we came up with several use cases where this would be a good fit. I've added this feature to our list of possible future enhancements. As you can imagine, this is a long list and the features will need to be prioritized, so I can't say when or how this will be implemented at this time.

Also, I received your email, and will try to call to discuss your feedback. Maybe we can also talk about this feature as well.

Thanks!
Ray

Thank you for your interest in Good Data. For cost-related inquiries, please send future requests to info@gooddata.com

Thanks!

It is definitely possible to upload null values in the source CSV file. The CSV format is a text file which separates cell values by commas. A null value in a cell would look something like this in the resulting CSV:

"some text",,"more text"

In this example, column A = "some text", column B = null, and column C = "more text"

One potential problem could be spaces in between the commas. In this case, we should extend your post title to:

Null is not the same as 0 and both are not the same as a blank space.

If you have any further problems with this, please let us know and we can try to hunt down the problem.

Hi Eric,

I'm sorry we weren't able to get this to work. To look closer at this, it would be great if you could share the CSV files with me. I will load them and try to replicate the problem on my end, and hunt down any reason for this failure. Feel free to send the files to support@gooddata.com and I'll try to get back to you with what I can learn as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Ray

Hi Eric,

Here is my best guess as to what is occurring in this situation. If I understand correctly, you have already uploaded this data, and successfully performed some mappings to the data set. Now, you are trying to update this data. Upon upload, the application will then try to automatically re-create the mappings that you had done previously.

I will try to address each of your points here and hopefully the answer will fall out of this:

1) Initial upload of Employee attributes
During upload, some columns were "not imported" and some names were changed

2) Performed mappings to this data set
OK

3) Update of Employee attributes
Here is where I think the problem is. When updating an existing data set, the same number of columns (in the same order) as the original file must be present. Even if columns were "not imported" in the original upload, these columns should be included in the update. From your description, it sounds like this was done.

Another key point here is that the updated data should overwrite the existing data, not append to it. This is because of the mappings that were done previously. I am assuming that records from other data sets were mapped to this table by some user id or unique field. However, if the new data uploaded was appended to the old data, then unique ids can appear multiple times. Therefore, the application does not know which one to map to.

Potential solution
First, please make sure that the newly updated file contains no duplicates (in other words, that each record, or superset value, is unique). Secondly, please be sure to completely overwrite the existing data rather than append to it (thereby creating duplicates of existing records).

In the screenshot below, note that the "Overwrite previous uploads" box is checked. If this box is unchecked, then the new data will be appended to the existing data.



I hope this answers your problem. If you still have problems, please let us know. I would be happy to schedule a call if this isn't clear, or if this doesn't answer your question.

Regards,
Ray

support@gooddata.com
(415) 200-0194

Any user-created project can be made public. Once a project is "public," this means that you can embed reports onto a third-party site, and visitors to the site will be able to view the reports without authenticating. (Usually, data is kept private and only logged-on project members can see reports.) In addition, visitors can join the project themselves and begin to analyze the data, without first receiving an explicit invitation from the project admin.

If you have a report that you would like to make public, let us know at support@gooddata.com and we can turn this feature on for you.

The baseball public project you are referring to was posted about here:
http://www.collaborativeanalytics.com/2009/06/16/good-data-in-action/

From here, you can see the sample report and also join the Major League Baseball project.

We'd love to hear what you think about it!

Thank you for your feedback. We currently do not have this type of chart available within the product. We recently introduced a new charting library that has many "look and feel" improvements over the old charts, but we have not added new chart types. I have logged the gauge chart type into our enhancements log for possible inclusion in future releases. At this time, I unfortunately can't give a clearer timetable about implementation of this feature.

I'm sorry you've been experiencing problems with the report embedding feature. Thank you for bringing these issues to our attention. We are aware of the causes of these problems, and we will be working to fix these issues as soon as possible. In addition, we plan to release some new report embedding features in the next update, scheduled to be released in a few weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope you will be pleased with the upcoming features.