We are continually developing new features and functions for the Panopticon Developer SDK. This is a summary of important changes to the product.

Features added in Version 5.9

Time Series Dual Y Axis Support

The combination graph has been enhanced to allow dual Y axis (Left & Right). The method of creating combination graphs has been updated to specify:

• Visualization Array
• Alignment Array (Left or Right)
• Left Alignment Variable
• Right Alignment Variable

Features added in Version 5.8

Visual Table

A new Visual Table meta visualization has been introduced that allows for a tabular display, utilizing visualization per cell, defined on a column basis. Available visualizations include:

• Tile (updated from previous releases)
• Bullet Graph
• Dot Plot
• Bar Graph
• Line Graph
• Needle Graph

The Table supports:

• Column sorting
• Column width adjustment
• Section expand/collapse
• Subtotals
• Grand totals

Fixed Numeric Axis

A new numeric axis alternative has been introduced, where the location of minor grid lines and the display of labels can be defined. The specification of labels, allow text values to be associated with specific numeric values.
Common use cases would be when displaying yield or forward curves.

EX Style Time

A new based Time Ruler control has been added that is similar in style to the EX Time Window Filter Ruler.

New Aggregation Methods

New aggregation methods have been added including:

• Product aggregate
• Child percentile
• Negative sum
• Positive sum
• Sibling rank

Updated Tile Visualization

The Tile visualization has been substantially updated to support:

• Display of values (independent of color)
• Left alignment of text, dates and times
• Right alignment of numbers

The Tile is the most common visualization used within the visual table.

Updated SDK Examples

The following examples have been re-written to take advantage of the batching table interface introduced in the 5.7 release:

• Real Time Timeseries

The following examples have been updated to replace old style rulers, with filters, and the organizer, with the breakdown widget:

• Data Grid
• Earth Map
• Hello Breakdown
• Micro Explorer
• Real Time Micro Explorer

Deprecated Functionality

The following features have been deprecated.

• Rulers. These have been replaced by the Filters.
• Organizer. This has been replaced by the breakdown and pivot control widget.
• Effects.
• Barseries visualization.

The following examples have also been removed from Panopticon Developer:

• Barseries data visualization
• Throttling
• Zooming

Features added in Version 5.7

Batching Table Interface

The BatchingTable interface has been introduced to significantly improve performance in high throughput scenarios, allowing the batching of row, time and column updates.

Shapes (Choropleth / SVG Path Rendering)

The Shapes visualization has been added to allow the display of Choropleth Graphs, and any other displays built from SVG Paths. The visualization supports a new Shapes variable for the SVG path, plus numeric or categorical colors.

Spread Graph

The Spread Graph has been added to allow the display the variance or spread between two time series. The Spread Graph supports a new Spread variable which has two inputs:

• Base series
• Reference series

Numeric Needle Graph

The Numeric Needle Graph has been added primarily to allow the display of price distributions. Unlike a traditional Bar Graph the X Axis is numeric rather than categorical. Bars are positioned along the X axis according to their X value, and their height is determined by their Y values.
It shares the same axes as for the Scatter Plot and Numeric Line Graph.

Improved Stack Graph

The Stack Graph has been improved to support a Numeric Y Axis, plus better numeric color scheme representation, and null handling. The use of a numeric Y axis allows it to be used with time series reference lines. 

Improved Line Graph

The Line Graph has been improved to support:

• Line interpolation modes (stepped and interpolated)
• Dot radius
• Line dash pattern

Combination Graph & Reference Line Graphs

A combination graph has been added to the SDK to allow Line Graphs to be combined with other time series visualizations. Specifically, reference line graphs can be added above or below the selected time series visualization. All time series visualizations with a numeric Y axis can be used in the Combination Graph. For example:

• Line Graph
• Candlestick Graph
• OHLC Graph
• Spread Graph
• Stack Graph

Additional SDK Examples

Two new examples have been added to the SDK:

• Shapes
• Reference Lines

Features added in Version 5.6

Candlestick Graph

The Candlestick Graph has been added to allow the display of time based distributions. Candlestick graphs are a traditional financial visualization for display time based price distributions. Specifically for each time slice, they display:

• Opening price
• Highest price
• Lowest price
• Closing price

The Candle is filled if the closing price is lower than the open, and empty if the closing price is higher than the open. The vertical line (or Candle wick) displays the range of traded prices across the period.

OHLC Graph

The OHLC Graph has been added to provide an alternative to the Candlestick Graph. OHLC Graphs also display time based distributions of price data. For each time slice, OHLC Graphs display:

• Opening price
• Highest price
• Lowest price
• Closing price

As with the Candlestick Graph, the vertical line defines the range of traded prices across the period. However in this case the Left notch determines the opening price and the right notch determines the closing price.

EX Style Date Time Filter

The EX Style Date Time Filter has been added to the SDK to support filtering across columns of type Date Time (rather than defining a time window). Use cases include filtering on:

• Maturity Date for a set of bonds
• Delivery Date for a set of products

Treemap Layout Enhancements

The Treemap layout has been enhanced to allow selection of the layout approach. The standard layouts are built from the bottom leaf nodes, and as the visible depth is changed the layout will be constant. For use in non-additive and netting scenarios; however, the layout should change to reflect the lowest visible detail level. In this case the following can be used:

• TreemapLayoutAlgorithm.SquarifiedWithLikeLeafSize;
• TreemapLayoutAlgorithm.StripWithLikeLeafSize;

Axis Layout Enhancements

The Numeric Axis has been enhanced to display Axis Titles.

• xFactory.TitleMargin = fontHeight;
• xFactory.ShowTitle = true;

The Time Axis has also been enhanced to display the Snapshot Time as a configurable Grid Line.

Features added in Version 5.5

Cross Tabbing

Visualizations can now be Cross Tabbed into small multiples, by rows, by columns or by both. The Cross Tab axes can be hierarchical, flat, or not present. Each small multiple within the Cross Tab is a subset of the total data set, allowing greater comparison between data set constituent parts.

EX Style Breakdown Widget

The EX Style Breakdown widget has been added to the SDK to support:

• Hierarchy display and modification
• Visible depth/detail modification
• Drill
• Sorting
• Cross Tabbing (rows & columns)

Surface Plot

The Surface Plot has been added to the SDK. This provides a method for displaying numeric surfaces where the X and Y axes represent the surface and color represents the Z axis. Color can be either:

• Continuous
• Stepped (Contour Lines)

Numeric Line Graph

The Numeric Line Graph has been added to the SDK and supports the ability to display Line Graphs with a numeric X axis instead of Time. This graph can also be used to display cuts through the Surface Plot.

Needle Graph 

The Needle Graph has been added to allow the display of time based transactions. The Needle Graph is essentially a time-based Bar Graph where each bar is located at a slice of time. The most common usage is in the display of Price Volume or Turnover. 

Tile Visualization

Tile Visualization has been added to the SDK, which simply displays a single block of color, or an associated label, detailing the aggregated value. When combined with Cross Tab capabilities, it supersedes the Heat Matrix and allows matrices to be produced. If the color is subdued or removed, a pivot table is produced. The Heat Matrix SDK example has been modified to use this combination of the Cross Tab and Tile visualization.

Business Time Axis

The time axis used on all time series visualizations (Line Graph, Needle Graph, Stack Graph, Horizon Graph) has been enhanced to support business times, where trading periods can be shown, while idle periods (for example, evenings, and weekends) can be hidden. This makes it possible to display intra-day time series across several days.

(Minimum & Maximum)

The text axis has been enhanced to support a minimum interval and maximum interval. This allows the width of graph components such as bars within a Bar Graph to be defined. Producing both a maximum size for the axis and a minimum size, which if too large for the available screen real estate will automatically add scroll bars. This is especially useful where the number of elements in a data set is unknown at the point of creation of the layout. The graph can be sorted, so that the most important items are visible, while smaller items are available through scrolling.

Additional SDK Examples

For the new Cross Tabbing functionality:

• Cross Tab of Bar Graphs
• Cross Tab of Line Graphs
• Cross Tab of Scatter Plots

For the new data visualizations:

• Numeric Line Graph Visualization
• Surface Plot Visualization

For the new Rapid Development Kit (RDK):

• Actions
• Simple Viewer
• Reporting

Features added in Version 5.4

EX Style Filters

EX Style Filters have been added to the SDK, including:

• Categorical filter
• Free text
• Inclusion
• Exclusion
• Numeric filter
• Numeric range
• Percentile distribution

The filters can be configured to act as either:

• Node filters
• Row Fflters

EX Style Color Legends

EX Style Color Legends have been added to the SDK to support:

• Numeric color schemes
• Categorical color schemes

Heat Matrix

The Heat Matrix has been added to the SDK and provides a method for displaying correlation matrices across two categorical variables. Text axes are used by the Heat Matrix, with the hierarchical breakdown being pivoted between the X and Y axes.

Dot Plot

The Dot Plot visualization has been added to the SDK which supports horizontal and vertical Dot Plots. As with all visualizations the dots can be colored by numeric or categorical data.

Pie Chart

The Pie Chart visualization has been added to the SDK, and allows for the display of standard pie charts, plus multilevel Pie Charts (sometimes called SunBursts).

Details Pop-Up Node Title Style

The Detail Pop-Up has been enhanced so that the title can either display the Node Title, or alternatively the full hierarchy.

Additional Aggregation Types

The following aggregation types have been added in this release of the SDK:

• Intercept
• Slope

Additional SDK Examples

Additional examples have been added to the SDK including:

• WPF example
• New visualizations (Dot Plot, Pie Chart and Heat Matrix)
• New filters
• Data binding
• Breakdown save and restore
• Color variable configuration
• Axes management and custom drawing
• Text time series

Features added in Version 5.3

Bullet Graph

The Bullet Graph visualization has been added to the SDK, providing a method for displaying summary figures such as KPIs. The Bullet Graph is a gauge that displays performance against target thresholds, and can be displayed both vertically and horizontally.

Bar Graph

Traditional Bar Graph visualizations have been added to the SDK, providing the ability to display horizontal and vertical Bar Graphs, which can either have a standard, grouped or stacked layout. 

Text Axis

The axis framework has been extended to include text axis, supporting text wrapping, angling, together with layouts.

Detail Pop-Up

The Detail Pop-Up has been redesigned to float above the visualization and can consequently extend outside the visualization control borders. The formatting options have been extended to support wrapping of text and variable alignment.

Additional Color Schemes

The numeric color schemes have been extended to include both a sequential monochrome scheme:

• SequentialNumericColorScheme.Gray

Plus five new diverging color schemes with a mid gray color:

• DivergingNumericColorScheme.BrownGrayPetrol
• DivergingNumericColorScheme.RedGrayBlue
• DivergingNumericColorScheme.OrangeGrayBlue
• DivergingNumericColorScheme.RedGrayGreen
• DivergingNumericColorScheme.OrangeGrayGreen

The gray color scheme is primarily to be used for the Bullet Graph, while the new diverging color schemes are primarily to be used for visualizations with a white background, such as the Scatter Plot, to avoid items disappearing against the background when values are mapped to the middle of the color scheme.

Real Time Excel Data Connector

A real-time MS Excel data connector has been added to the SDK, and demonstrated through an example which allows the spreadsheet source to be selected. In this case MS Excel is being accessed directly, and not via OLEDB as is the case in the ExcelDataSource example.

Line Graph Alpha Shading

The Line Graph has been extended to support alpha shading between the line and the zero point, when a single time series is displayed.

Constant Color Schemes

Constant color schemes have been added to support cases where color is not used to encode a variable.

Features added in Version 5.2

Scatter Plot

The Scatter Plot visualization has been added to the SDK, providing a method of simultaneously displaying up to four numeric variables.

Line Graph

The Line Graph visualization has been added to the SDK, providing another alternative method of displaying time series.

Axis

A common axis framework has been added to the SDK, providing a standard mechanism of implementing axis across the Line, Stack, Scatter and Horizon visualizations.

Time Ruler

A Time Ruler legend has been added to the SDK, providing a built in mechanism for dynamically filtering across time series and setting the snapshot time.

Shadow State

The framework has been enhanced to support shadow state, which allows additional visualizations to be linked to a single state, sharing all characteristics except for specified criteria. This is especially valuable for multi-visualization implementations.

Custom Pop-Ups

An example has been added in this release, demonstrating how the standard details popup can be replaced with a custom implementation, which may even include other visualizations.

Manual Aggregates

An additional example has been added in this release, demonstrating how external manual aggregates can be loaded into the state framework. This support for external aggregates supports circumstances where the aggregates cannot be calculated through the standard aggregation functions supplied in the framework; examples of this include calculating Enterprise Risk.

Custom Filters

An additional example has been added, demonstrating the use of custom filters replacing the SDK’s rulers. The example demonstrates the application of filters across all attributes within the data set, in both “row” and “node” filter modes.

Table Grids

An additional example has been added, demonstrating how the state can be synchronized with .NET DataGridViews. Both Row and Node synchronizations are demonstrated.

Equirectangular Projections

The newly added Scatter Plot visualization can also be used to display an equirectangular projection. This is demonstrated with the newly added Earth Map example.

Features added in Version 5.1

Developer 4 Legacy Features

Panopticon Developer 5.1 has been updated to include all of the legacy features that were part of the Panopticon Developer 4 SDK. These features include:

• Real-time effects used to highlight and emphasize changes in streaming real time data.
• Callouts and icons (previously known as label and flags), to highlight and annotate features in a visualization.
• Web components for building web-enabled visualization applications
• Ordered categorical color variable for coloring a visualization using ordered textual data.
• Strip layouter for the Treemap visualization, used when ordering data shown in a Treemap.

Visualization Plug-in Example

The SDK now include a complete example of how to write a custom visualization plug-in for use within the framework. The example shows how to create a basic interactive Scatter Plot visualization. See the Custom Visualization Example for details.

ResultSet Data Wrapper

In version 4.6 of the SDK the visualization component supported data binding allowing developers to easily connect any data in JDBC format. In Panopticon Developer 5.1 a ResultSet Data Wrapper has been added to achieve this functionality. The ResultSet wrapper will guarantee a minimum of memory overhead since the data is never copied to the Panopticon table model.

Context Menu Example

Instead of the hard-wired context menu in previous versions of the SDK, Panopticon Developer 5.1 includes an example of how to implement a context menu. This allows for full customization of the menu items and functionality.

Throttling

To limit the systems resources being used by the SDK when visualizing streaming real-time data with very high update rates, a good practice is to use throttling. This caches updates and releases them into the SDK at a defined rate as bundles of updates. In this way the number of recalculations and display updates are kept to a minimum. Look at the Throttling example to see how this is implemented.

Features added in Version 5.0

Horizon Graph

The Horizon Graph allows for a compact and yet exact representation of a large number of time series graphs in a single view. Because of its unique layout it can represent time series data in 1/6th-of the space required by a traditional Line Graph, allowing time based correlations to be identified.

Stack Graph

The Stack Graph allows users to analyze relative and absolute differences over time. Areas are displayed as individual lines with a colored area below. Each area is stacked on top of the area below it. The height of the uppermost line equals the total sum of all areas.

Visualization State

Visualization State allows for the creation of dashboards with multiple, connected visualizations. Rather than having to synchronize visualizations manually this logic is handled by the framework.

Plug and Play for Visualizations

The new release of Panopticon Developer .NET includes a generalized framework which allows for plugging in new visualizations when needed. Existing chart libraries can be re-used by wrapping them with the necessary interfaces. The framework also allows for the creation and deployment of entirely new visualizations within Panopticon Developer, taking advantage of its rich infrastructure.

Plug and Play for Data

The new version of the data model allows users to easily integrate legacy data sources into visualizations. This feature also enables the creation of highly specialized implementations of data storage to minimize, for example, data latency or memory consumption.

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