Configuring Charts with the Charting Wizard

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Layout Editor, Toolbox, Charts

Iron Speed Designer’s Charting Wizard configures charts in your application’s web pages.  The Charting Wizard is automatically displayed when you drag a chart from the Toolbox onto your page.  You may add charts to any page or ASCX control, table control or record control.

For example, to add a chart showing the average price of products sold per country, drag ‘Average of Order Details.UnitPrice by …’ from the Toolbox onto your page.  Similarly for a total order count per country, drag ‘Count of Orders by…’.

Using charts in table rows (repeating rows)

When you drop a chart inside a table row (repeater), Iron Speed Designer attempts to add a WHERE clause to limit the results to the row value.  For example, if add chart of Sum of Order Details.UnitPrice by Orders.ShipCountry to an Employees table’s row, each row will display a chart of Sum of Unit Price by ShipCountry for this EmployeeID.  If you do not want this restriction, you can add a chart into the Totals area and then cut and paste it to the repeater row.

Using the Charting Wizard

Step 1: Select a chart type.

Step 2:  Select the operation, Y-axis, and X-axis.

Option

Action

Operation

Charts can display a database record count, the sum of a selected database field, or the average of the values in a selected database field.

X-Axis

The database field whose values are displayed along the X-axis.

Y-Axis

The database field whose values are displayed along the Y-axis.

Step 3:  Select the chart options.

The chart shown is based on the actual data in your database and is shown in an actual size to be as realistic as possible.  However if your database is not reachable or does not contain any data, the Charting Wizard will use sample data.  (You will see Sample1, Sample 2, etc. as labels).  If your chart is placed in a table panel row (repeating row), the actual charts will display different data for each row.

Option

Action

Show titles

Indicates whether to show chart and chart axis titles.

Chart size

The size of the chart, in pixels.

Bar width

The width of column and bar chart bars, in pixels.

Colors

The color scheme used for the chart.  You can use a color palette for Line, Bar, Column and Pie charts with the standard .NET palette selection.  Alternatively you can use a single color for Line, Bar or Column charts.

Show Y-Axis as

Indicates how to display the Y-axis.

Show value on edge

Displays the Y-Axis value on the chart’s edge.

X-Axis label angle

Also you can show values or labels on the X-Axis (for Line, Bar or Column chart) tilted up to 90 degrees counter-clockwise (negative values) or clockwise (positive values).

Show label

Indicates how to display the value labels.

Records to show

Indicates how many records (bars or data points) to show in the chart.

Include remainder

The ‘remainder’ is a bar or data point that is the summation of all records not individually shown.  We recommend including the remainder if you display percentage values.

When displayed, the reminder’s label is populated from the resource file (RESX) using the ‘RemainderLabel‘ key.  If your application is migrated from the version earlier than V8.0 you might need to add this key and value to your resource file.

Order

Indicates how to sort the bar display.

Note: sorting relates only to values retrieved by the underlying Data Source.  For example, if you elected to retrieve the ‘Top 5’ largest values, then 5 largest values would be retrieved from the database and the display order would apply to those 5 values.  Selecting ‘Smallest first’ will display the smallest of the ‘Top 5’ values first.  To change the order of values retrieved (e.g., to retrieve 5 smallest, or to retrieve 5 first without sorting), change ORDER BY property for the underlying Data Source via the Query Wizard in the Property Sheet.

Step 4: (Optional) Specify the join path.  The join path specifies the SQL query INNER JOINS relationship between tables.  The Charting Wizard automatically selects the shortest possible path from one table to another so you may simply click Finish without going to this step. Generally, this default selected is the best path.  However, in some cases, you may want to select a different join path, particularly if you desire to include other tables in the join path.

You will not be able to click ‘Finish’ until a join path is selected.  If you return to the Options step and change the axis selection, the Charting Wizard will reset the join path and attempt to select the shortist join path. There is a possibility that joins are not needed at all, for example if the index field and aggregate field are from the same table.

Similarly if your chart is inside a table panel row, you may need a second set of joins to join the table where the chart is encapsulated (dropped) to the charts tables.  Again, the Charting Wizard will preselect the shortest possible join path, which you can modify if necessary.

Step 5: Click ‘Finish’.

When you click ‘Finish’, two objects are created: the chart control and an underlying Data Source.  These two objects are independent entities and modifications made to the Data Source via the Property Sheet are not automatically reflected in the chart.

Step 6:  (Optional) Additional chart control properties are available on the Property Sheet.

Note: Certain other properties related to the chart appearance are inherited from your application’s page style. These properties are listed in the Application Generation Options dialog.