Did you know that you can make charts with Visualforce? But what exactly is Visualforce and how can it help you to make great looking charts?
Visualforce is a set of tools and components that provide an intuitive and simple interface for constructing charts in Visualforce pages as well as custom components.
Visualforce Charting
Visualforce provides you with a simple method for making personalized business charts. For creating,these customized charts, you can use data sets form SOQL queries. This can data set can also come from your very own Apex code. You can configure and combine different data series to create unique and bespoke charts and display key patterns and data in a meaningful way for stakeholders.
Visualforce charts are made with the help of Javascript through client-side rendering. The power of Javascript can empower you to create all sorts of visually-stimulating and animated charts. Loading as well as reloading of chart data can be done asynchronously for more responsive pages and charts.
Using Visualforce Charts
You can deploy Visualforce charts when you think that the conventional salesforce dashboard and charts are not enough to display information and the data in a way that you like. You can also resort to Visualforce for composing custom pages that blend and display data tables as well as charts in a more impactful way for your organization.
Visualforce Charting and Alternatives
You can make use of the conventional salesforce dashboard and reports for displaying data in a simple way. You get plenty of functions and features through which you can configure and adapt your charts. This usual method is simpler for beginners because it does not entail programming of any kind in either Apex or Visualforce. That being said, this method is not going to be as flexible or versatile as Visualforce charting for this very reason. Although programming in Apex or Visualforce may appear to be daunting for beginners, it also allows users to customize their data sets and charts in powerful and meaningful ways that are simply not possible otherwise. With the power of programming, you can construct, modify and adapt charts and tables in very specific ways according to the criteria that really matter most at the moment. Through such charts, you can create a more convincing presentation that will empower you to communicate more effectively with your superiors, counterparts and subordinates by helping them to visualize insights and patterns more easily.
Although programming might appear more challenging to beginners, once perfected, it turns out to be a powerful tool presenting data in almost all ways imaginable. The programming paradigm is highly flexible and user-friendly. Visualforce charting can help you to harness the power of programming to create scatter charts, gauge charts, radar charts, pie charts, bar charts and other specialized charts. You can also think about creating other chart types more suitable for your purposes by utilizing the Javascript charting library as well since it provides a high degree of flexibility. Although the work and learning involved is greater, there is the added benefit of greater customization and flexibility. Thus you can carry out tasks such as integrating Google charts with Visualforce. For even greater versatility, you can include Javascript libraries for Visualforce charting.
Visualforce Charting Limitations
Although Visualforce is a versatile platform for making visually appealing and meaningful charts, there are also certain limitations to consider.
Only browsers that support SVG (scalable vector graphics) can render Visualforce charts.
Visualforce charting is carried out through JavaScript. Pages that are rendered as PDFs cannot display Visualforce charts.
Quite often, email clients do not support JavaScript executing for displaying email messages. Visualforce charting may not be the best idea for email templates or email messages.
The JavaScript console can handle messages and errors coming from Visualforce. During Visualforce chart development, you will need to work with a JavaScript debugging console, like Firebug.
There is not support for dynamic charting components at the moment.
Creating Visualforce Charts
You can define and create all kinds of charts on Visualforce using various charting components available on the platform. These components are connected to the data source that the chart will be visualizing.
There are two main ways through which you can create a Visualforce chart. The first way is to use the Apex method. When you write down an Apex method that calculates and queries the chart data, you can send it to the browser in a form that it can render. You can also create a chart that is defined with the help of Visualforce charting components.
Once you create the page that has the chart, you can load it to display your very own customized chart. While the page is loading, the chart component processes the chart data and activates the JavaScript that will be generating the chart. When the JavaScript is executed, it renders the chart on the browser.
You will have to make the chart container component to create your Visualforce chart. It will encapsulate at least one component from the data series.
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