Report Builder 2.0 - Chart

A picture tells lot more than a bunch of numbers, and charts (graphs) aggregate the whole range of data that is highly informative and aesthetically pleasing. Charts have a myriad of properties, both with regard to how they are linked to data as well as their visual properties that it is hard to justify describing them in an abbreviated fashion. This section and the hands-on exercise deal mostly with the basic principles of implementing charts in Report Builder 2.0.

Charts are basically used while creating a graph from the data to summarize important and relevant information. There are two ways you can work with chart in Report Builder 2.0. The easiest is to use the Chart Wizard. The other way is to start with a chart template and then associate it with a dataset.

There are many chart types such as bar charts, column charts, line charts, pie charts, area charts, polar charts, range charts, scatter charts and so on. The following screenshot schematically shows the various supported chart types. The chart type would depend on the data that it represents. Generally a chart should help visualize the data. A chart has its data region as well, its Tablix properties.

You can insert a chart on the report body by clicking Insert | Chart |Insert Chart and clicking again on the body of the report. This brings up the Select Chart Type window as shown:

Here you have number of options as shown. For each of these choices you have a number of other options as shown on the right-hand side when you choose the Column type.

Assuming you choose the default (the one highlighted in the above figure) and click on the OK button, the type of chart you chose gets added to the design area of the report as shown. You can increase the size of the chart both ways by dragging the handles.

When you double-click inside the chart, you see the drop-zones on its three sides as shown. These are the areas into which you can drag-and-drop columns from the Dataset or use the minimized dataset icon that gets displayed when you hover over this area.

When you right-click on any of these areas, you can access the various ways you can work with the charts as shown:

The important chart related items are category fields, series fields, and data fields. You can work with all properties of the chart from this drop-down menu and even change the type of chart you want to develop.

In Hands-on exercise .6.3, a rather long one, you will be creating a chart and modify some of its properties and use the Expression tool to set the number of properties. It is not necessary to complete this exercise in one sitting as you can save the report to the report server and bring it back and forth to work on it.