When it comes to charting, Geocortex Reporting 5 offers a vast amount of highly-configurable options to better assist you with visualizing your data. Using the Chart Designer feature, you can enjoy total flexibility and control in what information you want to portray, and how you want it to look.
In this week’s Geocortex Tech Tip, we explore how to add and configure charts inside of a report using an example that highlights the land value and the improvement value of each tax parcel on our LA StreetMap server.
Video Transcript
“Hi everyone, my name is Patrick Fingler. I work in our technical marketing department, and today I’m going to show you how you can add and configure charts within your reports using Geocortex Reporting 5.
Let’s take a look!
Okay, so in this tech tip video, I’m going to show you how you can configure charts within your reports using Geocortex Reporting 5.
Here I am in the Geocortex 5 designer interface. I’ve logged in with an ArcGIS Online identity, I’ve got a number of data sources that I have configured, and in this example we’re going to configure a chart using the tax parcels layer on our LA StreetMap server. I have created the data source connection to this map service, I can test it to make sure that it is working, and the next thing I am going to do is create a new report.
I’m going to use the Layer Report Wizard which allows me to use an existing data source, and then select my LA StreetMap data source here, and select my Tax Parcels layer that I am interested in. The nice thing about using that wizard is that it will already create a parameter for my ObjectIDs. So now if I preview this quickly just to make sure it’s working, I can see that I am creating a report that’s being run on those four ObjectIDs that I passed in. It’s a super basic report, but we can identify that it’s working.
Now let’s look at the attributes for our data. I’ve got a tax parcels layer and a variety of different attributes, but I am going to create a bar chart highlighting the land value and the improvement value of each tax parcel.
To begin, I am going to select our chart port element and run the designer. The first step you are going to want to do is create a new series. This is where you can define the type of chart you want to create. I am going to create a bar chart and now the next step is populating the data within this series.
This series accepts two things: an argument and a value. The argument is what you want to display on the X-axis, so this is going to be my tax parcel IDs and the value is going to be, in this case, my land value. I might want to enter that in the legend text to ensure that we know what we’re creating a chart on. So that’s pretty basic and we can confirm that this is working by entering in some IDs. We should see a pretty basic chart that is displaying land value for those five tax parcels.
What you can see here though, is that the same chart is being repeated for each feature and that’s not really ideal in this scenario. So, what we are going to want to do is actually move this chart outside of the Detail band. In order to do that, I can navigate to this Actions panel and insert a report header which will allow me to copy or move this chart into the Report Header, so that it is only being displayed once on the first page.
So again, if I re-ran this, we’ll see that the charts are being only being displayed once rather than five times. So, let’s start configuring this chart a little bit more!
The next thing I might want to do is create a new series to show my improvement values. I’m going to create a new bar chart. You can see it side by side. It’s important to note that I am going to want to select the same argument because they’re both using reporting on the tax parcel IDs but the value in this scenario is going to be the improvement value. One thing to also highlight is that all of the values in this example – at least for a bar chart – are integer or double values. You can’t have string values in here, so that important to note.
I’m going to select the improvement value and I’m pretty happy with that. Optionally if I wanted to change the colors of each of these bar charts or series, I could then manually start changing the fill style, choosing the colors of it, and make it solid etc. But in this example, I’m going to just use the default colors.
If I click preview, click run, we’ll see that I’m starting to get values here. Now, I don’t really like them side by side, it takes up a lot of space, so I might want to actually change this from a bar chart to a stacked bar chart and I can do that because they’re using the same X-axis. So, in this example, I might want to change this from a bar to a bar stacked and it’s important to do this for both series. I’ll change that from a bar to a bar stacked.
If I wanted to, I could also change the diagram or the axis titles by navigating into the primary axis and the primary Y-axis and adding a title. I’ll call the title for the x axis ‘Tax Parcels’. I’m going to set the visibility to True and the primary Y-axis is going to be the ‘Home Value’. And one thing I forgot to do is set the title for that. So, I’m going to go back into my series two and set the legend text to ‘Improvement Value’ so we know what we’re creating a chart on.
I’ll click preview, and I’ve got a nice stacked bar chart. Now I could additionally change where the legend goes, I might want to move this over here, so it looks a little better. I might also want to create a chart for each specific feature. If you want to do that, there’s a little tip that I can show you.
I’m going to copy this chart into the detail band. What I’m going to do, is I’m going to add a filter so that we’re only showing the specific chart for each specific tax parcel. In order to do that, you are going to navigate on each series – it’s important you do that. And we’re going to navigate down the Data Filters section here. We’re going to create a data filter, and in this example, I’m going to set the input as the tax parcel ID (I could also use the object ID as well in this scenario).
I’m going to set the report value as also the tax parcel ID. It’s important again I do this on both series, otherwise it won’t work. If I click ‘OK’ and now click ‘Preview’, what we’re going to see is a report showing one chart that shows all five charts or series. For each detail, we’re showing just each specific one, so we’re kind of zooming into each of these. The second one is not going to have anything, and this third one is going to have is going to have a little bit more, fourth and fifth and so on.
That’s pretty much the charting configuration within Geocortex Reporting 5 in a nutshell.
Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching!”
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