topic Re: How to display string values containing numbers as strings? in Dashboards & Visualizations

How to display string values containing numbers as strings?

Dominik — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 14:25:08 GMT

I extract with rex a field that contains numeric values, often with leading zeros. I want to display the values as strings, left aligned without getting leading zeros truncated.

Example values: 00123, 22222, 12345_67

When showing these values in a dashboard table, the String values are interpreted as numbers, where possible, and I get

123
22222
12345_67

Is there a way to get string values correctly displayed as such in a dashboard table?

I tried also the dirty way as proposed here, prefixing the strings with space or non-breaking-space, but it does not work (I'm on Splunk 9.0.4). It works when adding a visible char (e.g. "x"), but that makes the table unusable.

Re: How to display string values containing numbers as strings?

gcusello — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 14:44:36 GMT

Hi @Dominik,

using your data I didn't find any problem:

could you share some full log sample to test the regex?

Ciao.

Giuseppe

Re: How to display string values containing numbers as strings?

Dominik — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 14:15:50 GMT

Thank you @gcusello for the reply..

Probably my question was not precise enough. The data is ok and the sample produces exactly what I have, but Dashboard Studio seems to have a problem.

Using the data from above in a table widget as data source, I can reproduce the problem.

leading zeros cut off and colums formatted differently per row.

Playing around with this, I found a completely wired feature of the table widget. With a greater Result set, switching pages, it looks like the widget 'thinks' about the data and if the majority of lines cannot be misinterpreted as numbers, the whole page is correctly displayed as left-aligned strings. Otherwise the data ist misinterpreted as numbers and changed (leading zeros cut off).. Setting the Column formatting to string does not change anything.

In my untersanding, this is everything else than correct behavior for a display widget. But I'm a complete Splunk newbie and not sure if this is worth a bug report. Can you confirm that this is really bad?

Re: How to display string values containing numbers as strings?

gcusello — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 14:29:23 GMT

Hi @Dominik,

I'm delaying the use of Dashboard Studio as long as I can just for this reason: it still has some issue.

Anyway, using my search have you the same issue?

Ciao.

Giuseppe

Re: How to display string values containing numbers as strings?

Dominik — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 15:17:23 GMT

Yes, as written above. This is your example data. The data is perfect, the result fatal.

Re: How to display string values containing numbers as strings?

Dominik — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 08:22:00 GMT

I take "delaying the use of Dashboard Studio as long as I can" as good solution.

Widgets that change data values are inacceptable. 😞

Worth a bug report?