Query regarding Column Chart

RE: Query regarding Column Chart

komalc3 — Thu, 23 May 2019 09:40:02 GMT

The line chart worked for me!!

RE: Query regarding Column Chart

Mike Schmitt — Wed, 22 May 2019 16:54:26 GMT

The Appian-side solution that springs to mind for me would be for them to adjust the column chart component to detect when a column is rendered at a height of zero pixels despite a nonzero value, and render it as a column 1 or 2 pixels high anyway (or, at least, have a clickable number tag).

RE: Query regarding Column Chart

Stewart Burchell — Wed, 22 May 2019 14:18:16 GMT

Don't know what I was thinking of...you can, of course, swap out the column chart for a line chart:

Each node is then clickable.

(personally I think a line chart indicates the trends between the categories rather than each category being a distinct set of data which is why i'm guessing you were shooting for a column chart. But, hey, this works better than my previous solution!)

RE: Query regarding Column Chart

Stewart Burchell — Wed, 22 May 2019 13:57:31 GMT

This is a known issue with data that has a large variance and (as far as I know) there is no easy answer. One option is to catch in your expression that derives the data for the columns where values are less than, say, 1000 and artificially set them to 1000 so as to force the column to appear:

a!chartSeries(
        label: "Months",
        color:"AMBER",
        /*data: index(local!monthDetails, "id", null),*/
        data: a!forEach(
          items: fn!index(local!monthDetails,"id"),
          expression: if(fv!item<1000,1000,fv!item),
        ),
        links:a!forEach(
          items: local!monthDetails,
          expression: a!dynamicLink(
            value:index(fv!item, "month", null),
            saveInto:{
              ri!monthSelected
            }
          )
        )
      )

which results in something like this:

...and then have some sort of annotation on the page to indicate that the actual values are LESS THAN 1000. Clicking on the column will then allow the user to see what the actual value is. It's not great but it works.

I've seen some chat about how to handle such wide-ranging values in charts in general (i.e. nothing to do with Appian) and there are a couple of options:

have logarithmic scales (not intuitive to the average person but would be useful for mathematically-oriented applications)
discontinuous axis - so, in your case, having a y-axis that shows 0-100, and then a non-linear break in the axis that picks up again at 10k. This would get my vote.