Overview

Associates are an important concept in InstantAtlas.  Associates are sets of values that are attached to an indicator in order to act in a supporting role, generally to allow for more sophisticated behaviour in the dashboards. Some charts in InstantAtlas require associates to be included in order to work correctly. Some examples of associates are as follows:

1) You want to produce a dashboard displaying results of a health survey.  In the map you may only want to show percentages e.g. Percentage who smoke.  In the table however you may want to show some additional information for this indicator like the count, sample size, the upper limit and lower limit.  By setting these up as associates in the data manger this is easy to achieve.  If you give the same aliases to these associates for every indicator e.g. ‘count’, ‘upper limit’ then it is simple to configure the table to display these.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2) You want to present a set of census results in a dashboard.  However, you don’t want to overwhelm the end user with data and so decide to just show totals in the map e.g. % Employed.  You also have this data available broken down by different age groups and think this would be good shown in a bar chart.  By setting up the age bands as associates in the data manager this is easy to achieve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Setting up Associates

Use the Data Manager to set up associates.  Drag one or more fields from the left hand side onto an existing indicator in your data model on the right hand side.  At this point you will be asked whether you want these fields to become dates of that indicator or associates.  Choose associates and you will see them display in italics under the relevant indicator.