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Charting Data Points over Multiple Years in a Line Graph


James Gill

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I'm pretty new to using Charts in Filemaker Pro, but I stumbled across the excellent article over at Skeleton Key about how to use ExecuteSQL to create forecasting charts in Filemaker Pro.  One of the charts that really caught my eye was the seasonal index projection over time, because it mapped plots of data over multiple years into a line graph with the months contain on the x-axis.  After reading through the walk-through and downloading the demo file, I was disappointed to find that they were hardcoding the years of the projection into the y-axis of the chart, which is where I hit a limitation in using the native graphing built into Filemaker.

 

Basically, I want the X-axis to contain the month names (easy to do) and my y-axis to contain the summarized yearly data for each month within my found.  Is there any way, either natively or via 3rd party tool, to dynamically add to the Y-axis or am I forced to have a set number of Y-axis's on my chart?

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To my understanding, each line is represented by a “data series”, and these series need to be hardcoded. So I don't think you can add series dynamically using the native chart tool (but would like to be proven wrong).

 

On the other hand, you could add as many series as will possibly be required; if the data for a series is empty, nothing will be drawn. (Clunky, but works; and I think that after a certain number of series, the chart wouldn't be decipherable anymore.)

 

 Is there any way, either natively or via 3rd party tool, to dynamically add to the Y-axis

 

A Web Viewer and one of the many jQuery plugins should be able to do just that.

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Ok, makes sense.  However, I do have another question about data series in Filemaker.  Since I'm still relatively new to charting data, I was looking through the forums and trying to find out how to chart aggregate data over time from multiple data points i.e. charting average price paid for January, February, etc.  This turned out to be pretty easy as you simply use a sub-summary to sort the data and then can use a Summary field to graph the point on a chart.

 

My question is this.  If I DO have multiple data series that I want to chart (In this case, the years that I have on record) and hardcoding the years into the data series is acceptable, can I just sort by another sub-summary and then graph the corresponding data fields?  The only reason I ask is that apparently you cannot, as demonstrated in the attached screenshot.  The first years worth of data graphs, however subsequent years do not...

post-92176-0-15782900-1422033338_thumb.p

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The only reason I ask is that apparently you cannot, as demonstrated in the attached screenshot.  The first years worth of data graphs, however subsequent years do not...

 

Not easy, but doable; see attached.

 

Note that you need to capture the summary result in a calc field and reference that for the data source; using GetNthRecord() AND a summary gives incorrect results.

MultiSeriesChart_eos.fmp12.zip

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Sorry if I seem fairly terse, but 3 times I typed a fairly long explanation of what's going on and 3 times these forums timed out in the process and lost the reply, so this relatively simple explanation as to my on-going problem will have to suffice because I've already wasted like 3 hours on those replies.

 

Unless I'm going about this wrong, the above technique will not work for me because my sorted data cannot have Get ( RecordNumber ) + 1 represent the next set of data for the Y-axis.  I added Get ( RecordNumber ) to the attached screen shot next to your example.  Hopefully it explains why.  If not, let me know and I can go into more detail (and hopefully this forum doesn't lose that reply too...)

 

Your example uses single records to delimit years and months.  I have many many records between years and month that are being used to populate those calculations and summarys.

post-92176-0-24306300-1422490979_thumb.p

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Perhaps this might be helpful:

http://fmforums.com/forum/topic/94869-charting-counts-by-month/?p=434326

 

If not, blame yourself, not me:

 

 

Sorry if I seem fairly terse, but 3 times I typed a fairly long explanation of what's going on and 3 times these forums timed out in the process and lost the reply, so this relatively simple explanation as to my on-going problem will have to suffice because I've already wasted like 3 hours on those replies.

 

With all sympathy, you are asking for free help - so your strategy of saving your time by forgoing explanations is working against you.

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