Charts in a model app are a great tool for customisers to visualise data

Episode 8 : Charts

Transcript

Charts in D365 allow a visualisation of the data from a view. We discussed views earlier in the series so won’t go into that.

Starting at the Entity in your solution, you navigate to charts, select Add Chart

The new chart display comes up

We will begin with a simple column chart.

Select a Legend Entries, this is the column that will be counted or summed etc, giving you your Y axis

Next, select the series entries. This gives you your x axis bands. If you choose a date field, you can define the date period.

Now hit save and close.

The chart appears in the solution

Over in the user interface, if you select the entities and views, you will have an option to display a chart. This allows the current view to be displayed in the chart you select, getting you this visualisation

Here, you can see the chart we defined has been brought through.

If you select or one or the bars in the chart, the view gets filtered by the selected data and it also allows you to drill down the data, dividing the data into other categories.

This chart is a system chart. System charts can be part of your solution, being able to move between environments, but you will not be able to “secure” them. Either everyone sees the chart of no one does.

If you want to only share certain charts with certain groups of users, you should be using user charts. It also allows me to show you the other visualisations easier.

On the chart, if I select New, I will be creating a new user view, only initially shared with my user. The same interface appears allowing you to define the chart.

I have given this a separate name, hit save and close

Back in the user interface, on hard refresh, the new chart appears. Also, on the chart, I have the ability to share. Here I can share with other users or teams of users.

Using account, as there is more data, I will run through the options available to you. Firstly, I make a copy of the out of the box Account By Industry then select edit.

This chart starts off as a bar chart, firstly switch to a column chart. Next we can add a field to the series to show a max number of employees in each sector.

You can only have mor e than one series or legend entry, not both at one time. So next I remove the number of employees and add a second series for country region

You can see now that the bars are split up by country then industry. Swappng the series over, allows you to imagine the data in a different way

Lets looked at the other options, Stacked Bar or Column is great for you to show percentage data, but only works if the totals are roughly the same.

Areas have a different visualisation, good for time line data to show increases.

Line does nto have the overlap like area, again great to show variation in time.

You will notice that I can not choose the other types. This is because I have more than one series or legend displayed. These visualisations rely on 2 dimensional data only.

I remove the series for country to show these other options and select a simple Pie chart. This chart has a high number of records that are redundant, no industry, so it may be worth fitlering using a different view, or fixing the data.

Funnel charts are really useful to show progress through a sales cycle, changing the size of the segment depending on the count of records.

Tags display a list of the fields in the category & a count. Great for quickly visualising other data for filtering.

And finally donuts are another visualisation

This works well with small sets of types.

To limit data, either use a different view or you can grab the top or bottom number of records from the view. Here I limit to the top 3 types displayed, hence our visualisation is a lot more appealing