I have talked about Alteryx being fun, but it can also be useful for the most interesting things. I added the color picker control to the Report/Map tool so you can pick a palette for theming on - I know, I know, it should have been there from the beginning. The very next request was that people want unique value theming to work with more than 16 unique values. That's simple now, just make a larger palette in ReportSettings.xml, right. Well after staring at a list of colors I couldn't see an easy way of making a set of say 60 or so that are all different enough from each other. Rob suggested picking some values and then extrapolating all the possible colors and visualizing it, but we couldn't figure out how to do that... Alteryx to the rescue. We created a simple module that creates a list of possible R, G, B values based on a simple input.
Now, how do we visualize it? Simple again. This time I had to use the expert mode on the Report/Text tool to set the background of a table cell. This creates a nice looking report (although it is even nicer with Josh's new browse tool - you'll have to wait for the next beta for that). Now there is the slight problem of the colors being in too close an order, so I added a random sort - a worthwhile technique.
Now that I had a nice module that could produce color palettes easily, it's a simple matter of adding them to ReportSettings.xml (in the runtime data directory). I added palettes for 25, 62 & 123 colors, although the 123 color palette is difficult to distinguish all the colors.
For others who might enjoy the module, download here.
