Our First "vChart" with SpotOn Vantage
Posted by Mark Mallany on Fri, Apr 09, 2010
Hello all,
Lets start off with a walk-through of how to configure a vChart into your IBM Cognos Report. I am a big fan of the simplicity of column Charts, so today I am going to guide you through configuring a 3D Column Chart.
A quick note before I start, I am using vChart 1.3. If you are using a earlier version some of the Chart Studio names / labels might be slightly different, but you should be able to follow along.
Lets get started:
- In Report Studio make a report just as you want it. Be sure to include at least one "Vantage Chart" in your report.
- Launch Vantage Administration from your launch dropdown.
- Add your report into Vantage Administration by using the "+" button and navigating to your report.
- Configure your Data Exchange by providing a unique DSN name so that our chart can communicate with the data source.
- Click on the "Configure Visualisations" tab, and then click on the "*" at the end of the text input corresponding to your chart (If only have 1 chart then your chart will be named 'Vantage_Chart_1' by default) to launch the vChart Studio.
- Alright since we are making a Column Chart, click on the "Column" Chart Group in the Chart Groups list. The Coverflow will update and show you all the possible column charts you can use. For the purpose of this demonstation lets pick "Column3D".
- Now we need to tie in the chart to the data from the report. Click on "Choose Data" to navigate to the Data Configuration area.
- Pick a the Report Studio Query you want to use from the Select Query dropdown.
- Set up the fields from the query you want to use for the X-axis and Y-axis.
Pat yourself on the back, we are done!
If you have the "Preview" button you can check out what your chart will look like. There are many customizable properties of the chart but we will leave those for future posts. Of course, you are going to want to save before you exit Chart Studio. To do so click on one of the disk icons located in the top-right of Chart.
Here is my chart, containing some data about profit by year
