Top-N Analytics

The Top-N analytics plugin is available in the Hub.

Top-N returns the top "n" records from the input set, based on the criteria specified in the plugin configuration.

Configuration

Property	Macro Enabled?	Description

Property

Macro Enabled?

Description

Top Field

Yes

Required. Input field that should be used to compare records. It must be a numeric type (int, long, float, or double).

Results Number

Yes

Optional. the size of the top-N to be generated. If the number of input records is less than N, then all records will be ordered by the Top Field specified above.

Default is 1.

Ignore NULL Value

Yes

Optional. Whether to ignore records with a NULL value in the Top Field. Defaults to false to treat NULL as the smallest value.

Default is false.

Usage Notes

This plugin takes input records and returns a specified number of records with the highest values in a given field. If the total number of input records is smaller than the specified number, output records will contain all records sorted by their values in the given field in a descending order.

Here is how the plugin works with a simple example. Let's say the input records have two columns ("name" and "age") and you want to track the top three records, ordered by "age", without ignoring null values. The configuration for the plugin would specify:

Top Field as age
Results Number as 3
Ignore NULL Value as false

If these are the input records:

name	age

name	age
alice	NULL
bob	1
dave	6

then after applying the configuration, the output records will be:

name	age

name	age
dave	6
bob	1
alice	NULL

If the Null Field Value is set to true to ignore records with NULL values in the "age" field, the output records will be:

name	age

name	age
dave	6
bob	1