Forum Discussion

mnagel's avatar
mnagel
Icon for Professor rankProfessor
6 years ago

value lookups

One of the biggest challenges with LM is the reliance on numbers only in datasources -- the reason is understood, but the result is often messy and many backflips must be done to get a usable result in many cases.  I recommend that there be a "lookup" function for numbers that can be associated with datapoints so numeric values can be replaced with text when that is appropriate.  An example I just ran into today was after I added the OpenWeatherMap datasource from LM Exchange.  It did not include the weather condition, so I added that to the datasource.  The values for these range from 200's to 800's indicating "clouds", "rain", etc.  You could in theory create a legend for this as is done typically, but the list is too long in practice for 60-odd values (https://openweathermap.org/weather-conditions).  If those code-to-string lookups could be defined and referenced, then the value displayed in graphs, in alerts and anywhere else applicable could be displayed as the mapped values, not the original codes.  This obviously applies much more widely than this example, but this example shows more clearly how the current method breaks down.