BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Last Week in the Forums: Changing Data Causing Coloring Issue in Area Chart, Coloring Categories the Same Across Multiple Charts, and more...

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. We're in the last week of the year! The BIRT Exchange forums have been quiet in the past week because of the holidays. I don't expect that they'll pick back up again until the beginning of next year! Many great questions and answers are being posted every day. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post from last week is about a coloring issue in an area chart. There isn't much explanation to go on for this issue. Two charts are shown in an attached image with different coloring. One showing the correct color and one showing different colors. The complaint is that the colors change depending on data order. If you've had an issue like this before, feel free to comment in the thread.

The second topic from last week that I'll cover is making all charts in a report have the same colors for shared categories. The series palette determines the color of the data points in your chart. The data points are colored in order based on the palette. If you have multiple charts with the same categories, but the charts are sorted in a way in which the categories aren't in the same order, the data points for each category will have different colors. An example in this thread will show how to use a simple script to provide custom coloring for each data point and legend item to match across all charts.

The last topic for this week is merging data in a joint dataSet. When you join two dataSets together, many times you'll end up with incomplete columns or two fields that you'd like to merge. To handle this issue, all you need to do is create a computed column in your new joint dataSet. In this computed column, you can fill in a default value for null values or if you want to merge two columns, you can check which column has data of the two columns you want to merge, and use that value as the output for the column.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment. I hope everyone has a safe New Year! See you in 2012!