A More Advanced Pie Chart for Analysis Services Data - Page 8

March 2, 2009

Verify Operation of the Pie Chart

Let’s ascertain the accuracy and completeness of our construction efforts. We will execute the report with the following steps:

The new report generates, displaying both the original matrix and new Pie chart data regions.

The Pie chart data region appears as depicted in Illustration 40.

We can easily verify the displayed simple Pie chart totals against the matrix data region by comparing any given Sales Reason’s Internet Sales Amount displayed in the Pie chart data region to the total Internet Sales Amount corresponding to the respective Sales Reason in the matrix data region. For example, if we add CY 2003 – Europe – Price – Internet Sales (1,519,252) and CY 2004 – Europe – Price – Internet Sales (2,066,776), we obtain a total that corresponds with the total Internet Sales Amount (consisting of a combination of amounts for Calendar Years 2003 and 2004) displayed for Europe (3,586,028) in the original matrix data region that we have left within the report.

Our enhanced Pie chart meets the expressed business requirements and demonstrates many details surrounding its property settings. The client representatives express satisfaction with our efforts, and state that, with a few cosmetic changes (including the simple removal of the existing matrix data region, and the subsequent realignment of the Pie chart on the canvas, realignment / resizing of the point labels to better fit the slices of the pie, etc.), the report will be ready for deployment to the targeted information consumer group. Moreover, they assure us that the details they have examined within the practical exercise we have undertaken can be extrapolated to their creation efforts of other, perhaps even more sophisticated, Pie charts.

As we can see from our examination above, Reporting Services offers a wide range of options for Pie chart creation and manipulation, to assist us in the delivery of information within the business environment. We extend our examination of chart types, specifically examining each type, together with the properties and methods we can manipulate for the precise presentations we seek to be able to deliver, in other articles of this series.

Conclusion

In this article, we performed a relatively straightforward examination of a Reporting Services enhanced Pie chart, from within a copy of an existing sample Reporting Services 2005 report that we created for this purpose. Our focus, as we stated in the introduction, was to create an enhanced, working Pie chart, using an Analysis Services data source (the Adventure Works DW sample OLAP database / Adventure Works cube that accompanies the installation of Reporting Services), and to discuss various characteristics of the Pie chart type as we progressed.

We examined relevant chart properties, and got some hands-on exposure to the manipulation of those properties to support the delivery of information to meet the needs of a hypothetical group of organizational information consumers. We noted that this article would serve as a basis, in some cases, for other, more advanced articles within the MSSQL Server Reporting Services series, where we use the Pie chart we created here as a basis from which we can concentrate on in-depth procedures and nuances that we can use to achieve precision in meeting specific requirements and data presentation effects that we might deliver in the business environment.

About the MSSQL Server Reporting Services Series ...

This article is a member of the series MSSQL Server Reporting Services. This monthly column is designed to introduce MSSQL Server Reporting Services (“Reporting Services”), presenting an overview of its features, with tips and techniques for real-world use. For more information on the series in general, please see my initial Database Journal article, A New Paradigm for Enterprise Reporting.

» See All Articles by Columnist William E. Pearson, III