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Business Component Mapping

A chart applet has, like all applets, a business component identified in its Business Component property. Records in this business component—subject to the current view, the current query, and visibility considerations—provide the data displayed in the applet. In the case of a chart applet, specific fields are used to provide the data for the category, data point, and series axes. The correspondence between axes and fields is specified in properties in the Chart object definition.

In the simplest case—a single bar or line graph, with no series axis—a category field and a data point field are specified. Pairs of category and data point field values are plotted as points or bars. If multiple records have the same category value, their data point values are added together.

The Oppty Chart Applet - Source Analysis applet provides an illustration of this process (Figure 114).

Figure 114.  Oppty Chart Applet - Source Analysis

This applet displays the number of opportunities on the data point axis plotted against the source of the opportunity (referral, magazine article, Web site, and so on) on the category axis. To generate the data required for the curve, the Source field in each record is checked and the number of opportunities for each distinct source value is tallied. The result is a two-row temporary table with a column for each source, as shown in Figure 115.

Figure 115.  Temporary Table for Single-Curve Chart Data

For a multiple-curve chart, a row is added to the temporary table for each curve in the series (Figure 116).

Figure 116.  Multiple-Curve Chart

The temporary table for a multiple-curve chart is illustrated in Figure 117.

Figure 117.  Temporary Table for Multiple-Curve Chart Data

To define the data mapping from the business component into the chart applet, you need to define the following properties in the Chart object:

• Category Field. Contains the name of a text or date field in the business component (except for scatter charts, which use a numeric category field). When the business component records are scanned, the different values found in this field are mapped into different categories. These values are displayed on the chart's X-axis labels.
• Data Point Field. Contains the name of a numeric field in the business component, or is unspecified. If specified, the value in this field in each record is added to the total for the category field value in the same record. If a data point field is not specified, the count for the corresponding category field is incremented rather than adding the data point value to the total for the category field. These counts or totals determine the height along the Y-axis of a bar or line curve point for each unique category field value in the curve. Rather than a total or a count, some other function (specified in the Data Function property) may determine the use of the data point field data.
• Series Field. Contains the name of a text field in the business component, or is unspecified. When the business component records are scanned, the different values found in this field are mapped into different curves. These values are displayed on the chart's legend labels.

  NOTE:  The maximum number of Series cannot exceed 50 when running the chart. If it does exceed 50, an error message is displayed. The user may have to run another query that results in less than 50 Series.

• Data Function. The Data Function property determines how the data point field values are converted into the new table's cell values. Possible values are Sum (simple addition), Count (number of occurrences of a cell value), Average (average value per record), and Plot (different from Count only in that when a cell is empty, it is charted as NULL instead of 0).

The preceding descriptions cover the use of these properties for the most general cases. There are a number of special cases in which these properties are configured differently than described. Some special case configuration scenarios are described in the sections that follow. For descriptions of the properties, see Object Types Reference.