Simple Doughnut Chart for Analysis Services Data - Page 5

The Grouping and Sorting Properties dialog appears, with our modifications, as shown in Illustration 27.

We are returned to the Data tab of the Chart Properties dialog, once again, which appears, with our Values and Category groups settings, as depicted in Illustration 28.

We will not add a Series group in this Simple Doughnut chart. Series, when used, are also displayed as individual slices in the Doughnut. Each Series is also displayed in the chart legend (and each is concatenated with the respective Categories, where applicable).

We will move to the X Axis and Y Axis tabs in the subsections that follow.

X Axis Tab

The X Axis tab is disabled for a Doughnut chart data region. All settings are therefore “grayed out.”

Y Axis Tab

The Y Axis tab, like the X Axis tab, is disabled for a Doughnut chart data region. All settings are therefore “grayed out.”

We will move to the Legend tab next.

Legend Tab

We advise our client colleagues that, since the default position for the legend is to the right of the chart area, and since our simple Doughnut chart may be wider than expected, due to its nature and the amount of data we are presenting, placing the legend underneath the chart will offer another means of more efficiently arranging the overall presentation.

The Style Properties dialog box appears, defaulted to the Font tab.

The Font tab of the Style Properties dialog appears, with our settings, as shown in Illustration 29.

We note the presence of the Border and Line and Fill tabs, but we will leave the settings within each at default, at this point.

We return to the Legend tab, once again, where we will leave all else at default. The Legend tab appears, with our settings, as depicted in Illustration 30.

We will move to the 3D Effect tab in the next subsection.

3D Effect Tab

We inform our client colleagues that the 3D Effect tab offers us a means of transforming the ordinarily “flat” appearance of our Doughnut chart to a highly customizable, three – dimensional presentation. Here we can enable 3-D visual effects (via the checkbox to the immediate left of the Display chart with 3-D visual effect label). The four variables that we can manipulate are:

• Horizontal rotation
• Perspective
• Wall thickness
• Vertical rotation

Once 3-D visual effects are enabled, a slider becomes enabled for each of these variables, which we can move to adjust each variable until we achieve just the degree of readability we desire within the chart.

We will leave the settings of the 3D Effect tab at default at this point. The 3D Effect tab appears, with default settings, as shown in Illustration 31.

We will examine the final remaining tab, Filters, in the next subsection.

Filters Tab

The Filters tab is but one option we have, within Reporting Services, to filter the data that is displayed within our chart. We advise our client colleagues that we performed all desired filtering at the dataset level earlier within our practice session. When this is adequate (that is, when we can afford to filter at the dataset level for the entire report), we may achieve performance gains at report runtime, due to the overall retrieval of less data from the Analysis Services data source. But, we caution the client representatives, due consideration should be given to the various points at which we can filter within a given report, to ascertain that we optimize performance while retaining complete and accurate information for presentation.

The Filters tab allows us to choose either simple dataset columns or expressions to filter data at the chart level. This might make sense as a filter point if we were, say, using multiple data regions (charts, matrices, tables, lists, or a combination of these, perhaps) that were sharing the same common dataset(s), but where each region had different filtering requirements and needed to present different subsets of data from the larger, underlying dataset(s). Whatever our needs, Reporting Services, once again, offers flexibility in ways to meet the challenges involved.

The Filters tab appears, with default settings, as depicted in Illustration 32.

The Chart Properties dialog closes, returning us to the placeholder chart item in Report Designer, Layout tab. We will conclude our practice session in the next section, where we will verify the operation of our new Doughnut chart.