Several spreadsheet presentation-related questions

Hello everybody!
I am working on integrating Streamsheets in our telemetry monitoring system.
So I have installed Streamsheets 2.3.0 Docker image on a Debian 10 VM and started publishish telemetry data to Streamsheets’ Mosquitto 2.0 MQTT broker, and created a Streamsheets app to capture the data stream and show telemetry as a table and as a line chart.

So far so good, but I could not arrange everything on the sheet the way I wanted. I have encountered several issues along the way. Any help is appreciated.

  1. Is it possible to set cell format to display both date and time, showing not only hours and minutes, but seconds as well?
    I found a time format (without the date part) showing hours, minutes and seconds, but no date + time format that shows seconds as well as hours and minutes.
    As a side note, the date + time format is only available from the toolbar, and not from the “Format cell” menu item in the cell context menu (opened on right mouse button click).

  2. Is it possible to set the “wrap” format on a cell? For example, I have a long text in a header cell, and I want that text to be automatically wrapped, so that the column is not excessively wide. I was unable to find this option.

  3. The arrivalTime field from inbox metadata, when cell format is set to time, is in UTC. I found no way of converting it to the local time, other than manually adding a TIME(3, 0, 0) value (my TZ offset). This, however, is a crutch, since this approach does not
    take daylight savings time transition into account automatically. Is there an official way to show arrivalTime as local time?
    Please note that the time zone of my Streamsheets server is set correctly.

  4. I would like to display my telemetry data as a line chart, with X axis marked with arrivalTime timestamps. It must be an oversight on my part, but I could not find a way to configure line chart like this.
    I have tried arranging my data table both horizontally and vertically, but X axis is marked with consecutive numerals (1, 2, 3, …). The timestamp row (or column) can be used as a data sequence, giving me yet another line on the chart, which is not what I want at all.

Hello alekir,

1-3:
These are all good points and I will talk to the team and we will add them to our roadmap. Thank you for sharing! :+1:

4:
There are two things you could look into:

  1. incrementing numbers on the x axis likely mean the line chart is interpreting both your columns as y values.
    This is because the line chart acts as a category chart, which usually uses categories/strings and not numbers for the x axis. If you really want to stick with the line chart, go to the chart settings, look under “plot”, and select “First Column contains Category Labels”. This will do the trick, but for time charts I would not use it. Category charts always use the same interval in the x axis. That brings me to point two.
  2. Use the XY Chart. That one is designed for your use case and will automatically pick the right axis for you :slight_smile:

I hope that helps!
If there is anything else, which you would like to see in Streamsheets let us know!

Cheers
Tizian

Hi, Tizian!
Thank you for answering my questions.

I have tried adding XY Charts (of “Scatter with Line and Markers” type), but still no luck with having my X axis marked with my arrivalTime timestamps.

Here are two examples, with data in columns and rows (since I’m a new user I can only embed one image per post, so I’ll add more to subsequent replies):

As you can see above, if I set my X Axis type to time, it just shows 12:00 and 0:00 marks, not my actual arrivalTime (the leftmost column)

The same with this table, where both telemetry data and arrivalTime timestamps are in rows.

Hi alekir,

You have to check the checkboxes under plot, where it says:

image

Your range is not correctly interpreted, if these are missing.
When I create a chart from scratch, this is automatically set.

https://www.loom.com/share/b403b571075f4aeab0b9027eef718294

I think this should fix your problem. :slight_smile:

Thank you for the video!
I have checked my Streamsheets app, but it still did not work as expected.
Then I created two new apps, receiving messages from two identical data sources.
One of them worked as you have shown, but the other did not. I have then compared their charts and found the source of the problem - “Data in Rows” checkbox works in reverse: when it is checked, the chart takes data values from columns, and when it is unchecked, the values are taken from rows.

Here’s the same application with “Data in Rows” checked and unchecked.

I can totally see, that this checkbox might be confusing.
It is supposed to mean the data for XY points is in rows.

I will talk to the team and find a solution/better phrasing.
Thank you for pointing this out :slight_smile: