Charts

The best way to show charts is to define a query that would retrieve data for charts and then select “Chart” as the presentation option for this query. This is explained in the “Displaying Query Results” section. The query should find instances of objects whose attributes provide data values for the X and Y-axis of the chart. Charts displayed this way will be dynamic – the user will be able to see the values of the points on the chart as he hovers the mouse over the data. He will also be able to click on the chart and start some operation (that you can define).

It is also possible to define charts in presentation and reports. Such charts will be displayed as static images.

To add support for Gantt chart in your application you need to do the following:

1. Add some predefined business objects to your application that represent Gantt tasks, dependencies and allocated resources
2. Add business rules and process to create and process instances of these objects
3. Add a query that finds tasks and displays them and related dependencies as a Gantt chart

To add predefined business objects to your application select the Business Objects node in the tree, right click and select the Add Gantt Task Object command from the popup menu. Before doing this, make sure that you define your own object that represents a “resource” that will be allocated to a task (even if you don’t use resources in your Gantt). It can be any object that has an attribute called Name. After you select the command AwareIM will ask you to provide the name of the “resource” object and then it will create predefined objects called GanttTask and GtDependency with all the required attributes (Note that GtDependency has references to the tasks that it “connects”.

After this you need to define rules and processes that will create and manage tasks and related dependencies.

Finally you need to define a query to find task objects and display them as a Gantt chart. When a query looks for task objects AwareIM will automatically enable the Gantt option in the Display options of the query. You can then specify properties of the Gantt chart that you want to show. The Gantt chart will automatically include all dependencies related to the tasks.

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You can either use “chart report elements” or use images of online charts. For the description of the chart report elements please refer to the documentation of reports. To use images of online charts in your reports or documents do the following:

1. Define a query to display your chart (see Chart presentation of query results
2. When defining chart properties of the query specify a unique id of the chart (can be any string)
3. Define an attribute of the Picture type in some object to store the image of the chart
4. Create a document template that would use this attribute in a tag expression, for example

   <<MyObject.ChartImage>> 

5. Write a process that will save the image of the chart in this attribute using the SAVE SCREEN action and display the document template, for example:

   SAVE SCREEN 'my chart id' TO MyObject.ChartImage
   DISPLAY DOCUMENT 'My template using chart image'