Associating Icons to Data Values

To use an icon to represent an underlying data value or range of values in a column, you use a client-side NER. Client-side NER offers some key advantages when representing data values as icons:

• Reusability. The NER can be used from any icon column. An example is that you use a NER to capture the decision process associated with each icon data item and then use the same NER in all columns displaying that same data item.

• Consistency. The same type of data is represented with the same set of icons on multiple grids, over multiple applications.

• Flexibility. When you need a one-off or non-standard icon representation, you can create special NERs. Alternately, you can use data structures to pass more information than the current value of that single data column to the icon decision-making process. This enables more flexible icon representation.