Visio ShapeSheet manage shape data text using connection points of master - formula

I am trying to display shape data on a dynamic connector in Visio. This is to display the connection descriptions between classes in a class diagram.
The problem that I face is that visio does not automatically place the data graphics elements (shows in green in the graphic) in a good location when dealing with 2D connection shapes (the placement options are all relative the the shape centre) -- This does not work well with long connectors.
My intention is to use the two connection points at the end points of the connector (shown as CxnLeft and CxnRight) to place the data graphic shape (Text Callout - ID 22 below) in a position that is relative.
I have tried to create a custom parameter (User.LabelPosition3) on the shape data graphic (green shape) so that I can define its x and y co-ordinate however I have not found a way to access the connection shapes Row_1.X property -- As you can see the formula is not working)
I require assistance in any way to access this value. or a technique that would be better to provide this functionality

The Sheet.5 in your formula is incorrect. According to the image that you posted, the correct reference to your connector shape should be sheet.17.
In the Shape Name box (near the top of the posted image), the ID of the shape is 17. You probably extracted Sheet.5 from Master: Association.Sheet.5 which is incorrect.
Therefore to fix your formula, simply type:
User.LabelPosition3 = Sheet.17!Connections.CxnLeft.X
But I think the full formula should be:
User.LabelPosition3 = Sheet.17!Connections.CxnLeft.X + Sheet.17!BeginX

Related

How to fill map boundaries with external images?

I am creating a map of Brazil with its state boundaries, which is straight forward to achieve using ggplot2 and geom_sf.
However, this time around, instead of color filling each state with data, I want to fill each state's boundaries with an external image (png), similar to this example of the largest employer in each state.
I have tried a few settings of geom_image and even geom_flag to no avail (hence why I am not posting any code here).
Are there any suggestions on how to approach this problem?
You can try cartography::getPngLayer/pngLayer. These two functions takes a png as input, geotag and crop it to the shape of a given polygon and creates a rasterbrick object (as a tile) that you can manipulate and plot:
https://dieghernan.github.io/cartographyvignette#png-layer

rectangles on Grace plots

I have been using Grace (xmgrace) plotting for many years. I recently had an important idea for my work, and it involves rectangles on my plots. Grace supports rectangles (called "boxes"), but when I use a filled "box" it blocks my data curves. I want the curves to show over the filled rectangles. This is driving me nuts. Does anyone know how to put the filled rectangles in the background so they don't block data curves? Thanks.
Unfortunately there is no option in the xmgrace graphical interface that allows you to modify the z order of drawing objects such as boxes:
I also saved the graph as an .agr file and viewed it in a text editor. There doesn't seem to be any flag within the file format to modify z position, either.
Same story if you save a parameter file and check it in a text editor.
So it looks like it is really not possible in xmgrace.
One workaround would be to print to a postscript, EPS or SVG file and open it inside a vector graphics program such as Inkscape (results vary, you might need to experiment with filetypes to see which works best). Then you can easily alter the z order of objects.

Tableau map shapes overlapped

I am trying to render some geographic data onto the map in Tableau. However, some data points located at the same point, so the shape images of the data points overlaps together. By clicking on a shape, you could only get the top one.
How can we distinguish the overlapped data points in Tableau? I know that we can manually exclude the top data to see another, but is there any other way, for example, make a drop down list in the right click menu to select the overlapped data points?
Thank you!
There are a couple of ways to deal with this issue.
Some choices you can try are:
Add some transparency to the marks by editing the color shelf properties. That way at least you get a visual indication when there are multiple marks stacked on top of each other. This approach can be considered a poor man's heat map if you have many points in different areas as the denser/darker sections will have more marks. (But that just affects the appearance and doesn't help you select and view details for marks that are covered by others)
Add some small pseudo-random jitter to each coordinate using calculated fields. This will be easier when Tableau supports a rand() function, but in the meantime you can get creative enough using other fields and the math function to add a little jitter. The goal here is to slightly shift locations enough that they don't stack exactly, but not enough to matter in precision. Depends on the scale.
Make a grid style heat map where the color indicates the number of data points in each grid. To do this, you'll need to create calculated fields to bin together nearby latitudes or longitudes. Say to round each latitude to a certain number of decimal places, or use the hex bin functions in Tableau. Those calculated fields will need to have a geographic role and be treated as continuous dimensions.
Define your visualization to display one mark for each unique location, and then use color or size to indicate the number of data points at that location, as opposed to a mark for each individual data point

images ds3.js heatmap

I am having trouble determining if you can create a heatmap with DS3 or R that can map onto a list of icons. Specifically wanted to use little people icons like these http://goo.gl/Yt8CG and then show concentrations of activity onto them. I am fairly new to data visualization with DS3.js and R so I might not be doing the right google-fu. Thanks ahead of time if anyone can show me an example or let me know if you CAN do shading on icons not just dynamically generated blocks like http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4063318
The basic approach is no different from drawing a normal heatmap (see for example here). The only difference would be that instead of appending rectangles, you append a container for the graphic that you want to use.
Whether you would be able to adjust the shading depends on the graphic itself -- if it's a bitmap you're out of luck. If it's an SVG for example you can simply select the path inside that SVG and set the fill color just like you would for a rectangle in a normal heatmap.

where could we get such a landscape GIS layer

Here, I found a landscape GIS layer is really attractive, especially for presenting species/samples distributions. I would like to know if it can be reached in R or any other resources?
The GIS layer were used in Fig 1. in this article (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2010.03479.x/full).
This Fig 1 image is here:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2010.03479.x/asset/image_t/NPH_3479_f1_thumb.gif?v=1&t=gsk5sbhs&s=e5e2e4bbb194f799f7ab9bec85a416e295405784
I have ever tried to submit this question in R-sig-geo. But, I failed. I expect to get some helps/directions here.
Thanks a lots for any directions.
Best wishes,
It is very possible to download this file and read it in with R, configure it to have the correct geo-coordinates so that overplotting works easily, and showing the image with the right colour scheme and so on. But, automating getting all of the data you need is not so easy.
You need the colour table from the GIF file so that you can plot the correct set of RGB values for each pixel (the information is in the file, but I'm not sure if this can be obtained directly with R, I will check - it certainly can be with GDAL, but extracting those values in an automated way depends on various tools being available).
UPDATE: It turns out that the raster package gets hold of the colour information correctly and plots it, see below.
You also need the geo-spatial information, i.e. the coordinates of a reference pixel (say, the top left pixel corner), and the scale (the geographic width and height of the pixels) and this information is not stored in the file. Also, the coordinate system of the file is not in the file, and very likely not provided explicitly with the image data.
If the colours and the coordinate system were stored with the file, then it would all be easy and something like the following would be enough.
(Note this worked for me once, but then I think subsequent requests are blocked by the server, so try to only download the file one time).
u <- "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2010.03479.x/asset/image_n/NPH_3479_f1.gif?v=1&t=gskxvi17&s=0f13fa9dae78bd6837aeee594065c6ca112864d2"
imfile <- paste(tempfile(), ".gif", sep = "")
download.file(u, imfile, mode = "wb")
library(raster) ## rgdal also required for this file format
library(rgdal)
im <- raster(imfile)
plot(im)
This looks fine but now see that there is no "real-world" coordinate system, this is just an axis from pixel 1 to the number in the X dimension (and same for Y).
axis(1, pos = 2)
So, still we need manually work to discover appropriate reference coordinates for the image - and guesses here can work fine, but still they are only guesses and you may end up creating a lot of pain for something seemingly simple.
If plot points interactively is enough for you, then you might use locator in conjunction with points and lines and text, and related plotting functions.
Feng,
if I read the Google docs correctly, you can modify the labels and displayed features with the extra parameters style and element.
I did not include custom parameters for these in the RgoogleMaps package, however, you can easily pass ANY addition parameters via the path argument !
If you read the help file for GetMap carefully, you will note the following example:
note that since the path string is just appended to the URL you can "abuse" the path argument to pass anything to the query, e.g. the style parameter:
#The following example displays a map of Brooklyn where local roads have been changed to bright green and the residential areas have been changed to black:
## Not run: GetMap(center='Brooklyn', zoom=12, maptype = "roadmap", path = "&style=feature:road.local|element:geometry|hue:0x00ff00|saturation:100&style=feature:landscape|element:geometry|lightness:-100", sensor='false', destfile = "MyTile4.png", RETURNIMAGE = FALSE);
Hope this helps,
Markus Loecher
If you just want data like this image, then there are packages to access imagery directly, again utilizing the tools in sp and rgdal. This example is close using gmap in the dismo package.
library(dismo)
e <- extent(-7, 5, 38, 44)
gm <- gmap(e, type = "terrain")
plot(gm)
Note that while we specify the extents in "longlat" the image comes back in its native (Google) Mercator.
print(gm)
See ?gmap for more options on transforming your own data to match the image's projection, or the broader function set in raster, rgdal and sp for other options. There are other imagery providers that might be preferable, and quite a few options in the R suite of contributed packages.

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