Customizing the Chart Appearance

In This Topic

Nevron Chart for SharePoint is built with appearance customization in mind. The following sections discuss how appearance customization is achieved throughout the component designer interface.

Appearance Style Editors

The web part exposes visual editors for the editing of fill styles, stroke styles, text styles etc. for all chart elements. Fill styles, strokes styles, text styles etc. are generally called appearance styles, which are edited with appearance editors. The following list enumerates the appearance editors and links to the topics you can read to start working with them quickly:

Every appearance style editor has an Automatic check box located in its upper left corner. If you check it and press the Ok button of the editor, you instruct Nevron Chart for SharePoint to determine this appearance style automatically.

All appearance styles are displayed and edited by buttons, which have a preview box in their left side. The preview box displays a checker board with a blue "a" inside, whenever the specific appearance style is automatically determined. By default all appearance styles are automatically determined.

Data Points, Markers and Data Labels Appearance

Data series displayed by charts use a slightly more complicated method of obtaining the appearance. In the process of the determining the appearance of data points, markers and data labels the control will follow a simple, two stage process:

1. If the local chart area appearance settings (per chart area - for example Chart Areas > Chart Area 0 > Appearance) are set to automatic the data series appearance will be determined by the global appearance setting (per web part - Chart > Appearance).

2. After the series determines the style sheet they have to use, they regard the Color Mode setting. The following table shows the possible settings for this mode:

Color Mode	Description
Auto	The control will automatically choose between Data Point and Series mode depending on the current chart type.
Data Point	In this mode the palette colors are distributed across the data points. This leads to different colors per data point.
Series	In this mode the palette colors are distributed across the series in the chart - this is useful for stack bars and stack areas.

The following images illustrate two bar charts with color mode set to "Data Point" and "Series" respectively:

Series Color Mode	Data Point Color Mode

You can also customize the palette used to fill data points and markers by editing the palette items, as well as add/remove new/existing items.

From the toolstrip at the bottom you can Save and Load palette definitions, as well as load predefined palettes.

In cases when you need to fine tune the targets of the style sheet you can use the following check boxes, located below the palette preview band:

Fill Markers - whether the style sheet is applied to the fill style of data point markers.

Outline Data Points - whether the style sheet is applied to the outline (stroke) of data points.

Outline Markers - whether the style sheet is applied to the outline (stoke) of markers.

Outline Data Labels - whether the style sheet is applied to the outline of data labels.

Text Appearance

Besides appearance styles XML formatted texts play central role in the chart appearance customization, since they help you display titles, headers, footers etc. in a rich text format with many options. See XML Formatted Texts for more information.