Define Your Data

1. In your application, create model and set Basic Settings > Name enter: Businesses
2. To open the model in the workspace, click the toolbar button Display.
3. To load the Excel file, drag a  File Collector from the model toolbar into the model and set Basic Settings > Name: Business-File, then   Save the properties.
4. In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the file collector. PhixFlow displays a pop-up toolbar. Click Upload File . Browse to the Excel file.
5. In the upload window, click the   button. Your model should now look like this.
   

1. Hover over the BusinessData stream and select  Run Analysis, then click Yes to confirm.
2. Close the confirmation messages.
3. To check that the data has loaded into the stream, hover your mouse pointer over the stream and select  Stream Views then select  Default View. PhixFlow displays the data it has loaded into the stream.

Step 1

You now need to load the spreadsheet that contains the data into your application. 

• Open your application.
• Right-click  Models and select  Add. PhixFlow opens a properties tab for the model.
• In Basic Settings > Name enter: Businesses
• In the toolbar for the tab, click  Display.
• In the workspace on the left, PhixFlow opens an empty model.
• To load the Excel file, drag a  File Collector from the model toolbar into the model. 
• PhixFlow opens the properties for the file collector. Add a name: Business-File and  Save the properties.
• In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the file collector. PhixFlow displays a pop-up toolbar. Click Upload File . Browse to the Excel file.
• In the upload window, click the   button. This process
  • automatically configures the file collector properties to upload the file
  • creates a stream ready to hold the data. Streams are like PhixFlow's internal spreadsheets. 

Step 2

Script

1. If you look in the stream properties, you can see PhixFlow had named the file using the file collector name. It already has the list of attributes - the table columns - from the first tab in the spreadsheet. 
   

   Key concept

   At this point the stream knows about the data, but does not contain any data. This is the time to check that stream properties and the data types and sizes are correct. You cannot make changes to the attributes once data is loaded.

   
   

2. Have a look at the stream properties. The Basic Settings → Period is set to variable. In general PhixFlow assumes you are processing large datasets in batches. We are going to be making individual changes to single data records (transactions) . So that PhixFlow optimises processing for this type of data, In the Period drop-down list, select Transactional.
3. In the attributes, there is one data type that we want to change. Currently the Description is set to be a string with a maximum of 500 characters. To remove this restriction, we can change it to a "big string" which can have 4000 characters.
4. As we are going to have multiple people making changes to the data, it will be useful to be able to see who made changes. To set PhixFlow to track this for you, tick Audit Manual Changes.
5.  Save your changes. Notice that the orange background tells you that the properties have unsaved changes. When you save, the background colour returns to light green.
6. It will be useful to have  the stream properties open later, so click the Pin icon.

Step 3

You can now load the data into the stream.

• In the model, hover our mouse pointer over the BusinessData stream and select  Run Analysis.
• In the confirmation window, click Yes to confirm.
• In the bottom left of the screen, PhixFlow shows some confirmation messages. Close these.
• We can now check that the data has loaded into the stream. In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the stream and select  Stream Views then select  Default View. This simply shows the data using a standard table view. You can see that the same data from the Excel spreadsheet is now loaded in the stream, with the additional columns we added to the Attributes.

Before you start any PhixFlow project, it is important to take time to understand your data.

• What is your data? Do you need to represent people, places, products, money, time? These are the data entities.
• How does the data connect? These connections are the data relationships.  
• How will you represent the data in PhixFlow? This depends on the attributes the data has.
• Is the data "clean" or do you need to tidy it up?
• What data is missing?  PhixFlow can combine existing data from different sources and use it to calculate additional data.
• What volume of data do you need to handle? For very large data volumes, you will be able to use modelling strategies to process data efficiently. 
• What do you need to do with the data? What is the business problem you want to solve?

Remember that you can:

• PhixFlow can connect to data stored in external databases (list or link?) or data files in a range of formats (list or link?)
• PhixFlow analysis models are a powerful tool that you can use on any data project. Analysis models can help you to improve your data integrity, by 
  • identifying missing data, duplication and variation 
  • reconciling data in different files or systems.
• The Introduction to Modelling Course shows how to do this
• set up your own styles and palettes to create completely customised layouts. The Building Applications Course goes through this process.

You can represent your data and requirements in an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD); see Wikipedia. It can help you to understand the data entities, their attributes and relationships. An ERD shows you the data architecture. As well as clarifying the data you already have and what you need to calculate, an ERD can help you identify:

• static data: once added is unlikely to need updating. For example, the list of possible salutations:
  • Mr, Ms, Dr, Sir, Lord
• control data, that PhixFlow uses for  screen input, for example data that is displayed in a drop-down list.
• CRUD data, that PhixFlow will be able to create, read, update and delete.