Report Designs can be promoted to Templates to reduce the amount of
redundant work in large Reporting Projects. In the next chapter, we are going to look
at Charts and Drill-Downs. We will use the Employee Sales report that we built in
this chapter as a detail for a summary Chart report.
Charts, Hyperlinks, and
Drill-Downs
It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the world of reporting,
this is especially true, where we call these pictures Charts. Charts can present a large
amount of data with relative ease in comparison to large amounts of data output.
Charts are useful when used with raw data to really drive home points, such as
percentages, or used with other Charts to build dashboards.
BIRT has an exceptional Charting Engine. BIRT can create a number of different
Chart types, including the tried-and-true Pie Chart, Bar Chart, and Line Charts. In
addition, there are several other Chart types that were extras to BIRT's commercial
counterpart, such as the Meter Chart and Gantt Chart.
In this chapter, we are going to look at building a few different Charts centered
around employee sales performance. First, we will build a Pie Chart that will
illustrate the top employees based on sales. Then, we will create a Gauge Chart that
will show how close an employee is with respect to meeting a quota.
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