How to create a bar chart report

[Rob Venable]

Hi,
I'm totally new to Telerik reporting and I have a question. I'd like to create a report that displays all of the products that I sell on my website and the quantity sold for each product. I was thinking of doing it with a bar chart report. Are there any good examples out there that would walk me through this?

Thanks

[Steve]

Hello Rob,

If all you need is a chart, then you can use the RadChart for ASP.NET AJAX control instead.

Sincerely yours,
Steve
the Telerik team

[John Hughes]

I had the same basic question as Rob, but in my case some customers will want the bar chart and some will want the textual report.  I would like to take advantage of the export features in the report viewer for both cases.  So is it possible to show a bar chart as the report?

Thanks,

John

[Steve]

Hello John,

The Chart report item uses the same engine as RadChart for ASP.NET AJAX, so if you are familiar with it, you should easily get on the right track. There are some differences and limitations however both from chart and report point of view:

• the chart does not use the reporting data engine and in some scenarios you would have to create and bind the whole chart programmatically in order to achieve the desired effect.
• interactive features such as tooltips, maps, active regions and events inherent to the RadChart control are not supported.

Although it shares the same API as the chart web control, our suggestion is to look at the chart documentation in the report help as it is updated according to the supported features. You can also see the chart in action in two of our demo reports:

• Product Line Sales
• Sales DashBoard

Best wishes,
Steve
the Telerik team

[John Hughes]

Thanks Steve.  I got the bar chart to show up in my reports, but now I have another issue.  I have a simple bar chart that has horizontal orientation.  My QA person came up with a chart with over 50 items in it and the chart seems to stay on one page, so the bars become very thin and crowded.  Is there a way to tell the chart to use more than one page?  Or do you have another suggestion on how to deal with this?

If RadChart for ASP.NET is your suggestion, does it have export options like the chart in the reports?

Thanks,

John

[Steve]

Hi Rob Venable,

The chart can only render on a single page and cannot be carried over. You can narrow down the shown items by defining Min/MaxValue and Step for the Axis.

Kind regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

[John Hughes]

Do the Min/Max/Step values work if we are showing string lables?   In my current chart on one axis we have strings for labels and on the other axis we have numbers shown.  When I change min/max/step values for the axis with numbers I see the changes take effect.  If I do it for the one showing strings I do not see a change.  So this means the more items shown in the chart the bars get very very narrow and eventually things become so crowded you can no longer read it.  I guess I can control that in my datasource by only returning a certain number of items to not overcrowd the chart, but I was hoping I could find a way to do that with properties in the chart itself.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

John

[Ves]

Hi John,

Apart from configuring your datasource to return less items you can take the entire control over what is shown for X axis. Please, find the details in this help topic. Still, showing too many items might cause an overcrowded X axis and unreadable labels, it all depends on the number of items and available space.


Best regards,
Ves
the Telerik team

[Waqas]

Please help me , i m very new in dealing with charts and graphs , can u please provide me some example to use charts and graph , as i mentioned that i m very new , i search lots of sites for this but no one giving the basic step by step guide to use the charts in telerik  i also watch ur video about charts , but its hard to understand , can any one please help me , how to start with charts and graphs using telerik reporting .

Thanks in advance,

M.Waqas Aslam

[Steve]

Hi Waqas,

There are numerous resources on our chart item (which uses the RadChart for ASP.NET AJAX engine):

• Chart documentation
• Working with Charts in Telerik Reports video
• Sales DashBoard, Product Line Sales and Employee Sales Summary demo reports and their respective videos. The demo reports are installed as part of the Telerik Reporting installation, so you can open the reports locally and see the exact implementation from the building videos.

All the best,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Swetha]

Hi,
Does bar chart does not plot float values like (0.02)?
It is working fine for all positive and negative values but for only this 0.02, i am getting an error saying the value is not numeric.
How can i fix it?

Thanks
Swetha

[Elian]

Hello Swetha,

The chart should not experience problems with values like 0.02. However, there has been an issue with the chart in the latest internal release which would make it throw "the value is not numeric" exception. If that is also your case, we would suggest to wait for the Service Pack (which should be out next week) where the problem will be fixed. 

Regards,
Elian
the Telerik team

[Swetha]

Hi Elian,
Thanks for your response. My value was coming as (0.02). since it is coming in braces, i got that error. I removed the brackets and passed and it worked out fine.

[Swetha]

Hi,
I am printing a report and getting an error as below:
errorType: reportFrame is null.

Where as the print function is working for remaining reports but ging the above error for one report.
I am thinking there is something going wrong in reportviewerexport.
Can you please let me know.

[Stef]

Hello Swetha,

It is not a known issue and without more details it is hard to determine its source. Please compare your reports and check what is different between successfully and unsuccessfully exported reports.

If you need further help, please elaborate on your project type, structure, used product version, conditions under which the export fails, browsers. Any additional details from debugging will be helpful. If you have some code to attach, please feel free to open a support ticket.

Greetings,
Stef
the Telerik team