This lesson is part of the Reporting in Ignition course. You can browse the rest of the lessons below.

LESSON LIST

Autoplay Off
Take topic challenge

Description

Let's take a closer look at the Reporting module's Bar Chart component

Video recorded using: Ignition 7.9

Transcript

(open in window)

[00:00] The Reporting Module's Bar Chart component is very easy to use and has a large number of customization options. We'll begin at the Design panel. We'll drop a Bar Chart onto our report. And the first thing we need to do is set the Data Key. So we'll take a look at our Key Browser. I have this Bar Chart Data under Datasources. I'll just drag and drop it down in the Data Key. I'm going to do this one more time because I want to show you a very important property on the Bar Chart. That property being this Extract Order. I'm going to set the second chart to extract by column. Let's head over to the Data panel to get an idea of what our data looks like. You'll see I have a static CSV here and there's three columns. The first is category, just lists a couple of months, and then we have our values for our North and South areas. Back to the Preview panel. You can see how these two extract orders differ. When you extract by row, the category or the way the bars are grouped up, is determined by the first column, which in this case would be my category column. As you can see, this is why my items or bars are grouped by month. Each item is a separate column in my data source, so North area and South area. When the Extract Order is set to column, my items are grouped by the second and third column or each item is determined by that first column. Now if your data is on its side or the column names are the categories, then you'll want to set the extract property to column. Now let's take a look at some of the other properties on a Bar Chart. I'll head back to the Design panel. I'll select my top Bar Chart. I'll head down to the Property Inspector, I'll make it floating just so it's easier to see everything. In the Configure tab, aside from Extract Order, you can make your bars 3D Bars, you can turn the chart into a Pareto chart, we'll look at some of the properties on that later. You can also change the rendering style, instead of Bars you can do Stacked or Layered, we'll leave it at Bars for now. You can change the Segment Colors or you can add additional segments so if you had a lot of bars on your chart. There's also the Scripting event down here that allows you to make any sort of modifications to the chart before it's rendered. Next we'll take a look at the Properties tab. You'll see there are even more properties for us to tweak. We can change the Category Margin, which is the space between each category. So if we change to 0.5, we'll see that the items did resize. They're a little bit skinnier now, but that's to make more room between each category. Additionally we can add some space between each item. You see the items when I had them resized again just to add some more room between each one. I'll set this back though. We scroll down. You'll see a couple more options for a Pareto chart so we can hide or show that 80% line. Or we can change the Label on the Pareto Series. We'll set the Pareto option back to false for now though. Here's some Axis Options so we can turn Autorange on or off. We can change what the high and low is for when Autorange is off. The Bar Labels property, we'll put a caret on top of each bar so we can very easily see the value of each bar. You must change where the label appears on the bar so if you want it a little bit lower, you can set it to negative 20 for example. And below the label options you'll see basic properties, so height, visible width of the chart, and so on. So as you can see, there are many different properties on the Bar Chart that greatly impact how the data is presented.

You are editing this transcript.

Make any corrections to improve this transcript. We'll review any changes before posting them.