The Graph Pane

The Graph pane is the first of four tab panes on the Graph2Lab window. This is where the user manipulates the properties of the Graph2 object and views the results.

The secondary tab pane here is where most of the Graph2 property controls are found. There are five total property panes, but only three or four of them are visible at the same time because some only apply to specific families of graph. The three that are always visible are the Text, Colors and Legend tabs.

The Text pane, seen in the above illustration, allows the user to change the text of the various title strings for the graph. Only XY graphs have titles beyond the Main title, so the other fields are invisible when Pie or Polar chart is selected. We will see below that we can change the text color on the graph, although the text color change applies to all titles and other text on the graph.

The Legend pane offers options for positioning the legend area with the graph component, including Manual. We can also choose not to have a legend at all.

The Colors tab contains controls for changing the color used for Text, the color used for Lines and the color used to indicate any specific Series displayed on the graph.

If XY graph is the currently selected Major Graph Type, another tab labeled Axes appears. This pane offers checkbox options for manipulating axis properties.

A late addition to this subpane is a checkbox labeled "Stacked". This only appears when the minor XY graph type is Bar, Line or Area. When it is checked, the graph is reconfigured to display the data in a stacked format. When it is unchecked, the graph returns to its normal unstacked state. This is not a built-in feature of the Graph2 component, but we managed to do it anyway!

If Pie chart is the currently selected Major Graph Type, a tab labeled Pie appears. This pane offers a number of options for adjusting the positioning and ordering of pie slices and the overall look of the pie chart. We have included an option that allows the user to switch which column is used to build the pie using a dropdown list of group names if more than one group of data is included in the data list. Here we see the Pie pane with nearly every optional item exposed:

Especially notice the Label format field in the lower right. This is used to determine the format and content of the pie slice labels. As an added convenience, we have included keyboard shortcuts for the user to insert the proper tags. These all include Command(Control)-Shift. The supported keys are: s (sector number), v (value), c (percent - which includes the % sign - c because Omnis Studio already used Command-Shift-p to open the Print Destination dialog) and t (label - t for "text" because Command-Shift-l on Mac OS X is reserved for "lookup").

The Pie graph that received the configuation shown above looks like this:

As you can see, a great deal of work has gone into this product. Perhaps we should charge more...;-)