Oracle BI Publisher Blog

Another charting 'tidbit' today  - for those of you in the UK substitute the 't' - its too rude for American ears/eyes so we use a 'd' here ... 'phnarr, phnarr' - sorry America another UK joke, that is, unless you read one of the more boorish comics from the UK in which case, Go Finbarr!
 
I wish I could find a way to help you more to relieve the pain and misery that is the fine tuning of charts in BIP. There is a new chart dialog coming with a property palette for all the finite control you might need but thats a little ways out.
When I get questions, I resort to trawling throu the graph DTD to try and find what I need to get some niggly piece of text to behave as I need - its a slow and laborious process. 
I received a mail from Mayur from Keste, an Oracle partner yesterday asking:

I want a simple Bar chart (Single Bar) with numbers on top. See below image.


I have following code for the image on the template.

chart:

<Graph depthAngle="50" depthRadius="8" pieDepth="30" pieTilt="20" seriesEffect="SE_AUTO_GRADIENT">
<Title text="MBS Past 24hrs Dispatches" visible="true" horizontalAlignment="CENTER"/>
<MarkerText visible="true" markerTextPlace="MTP_TOP"/>
chart data definition ...
</Graph>

I am able to see the chart, with numbers. But numbers are with decimal points. Like 31.00, 20.00, 2.000 etc. I want to see number like 31, 20, 2, 13, 16 etc. I have tried to format using ViewFormat, but it痴 not working.

I have been playing with it on and off and getting annoyed, you may remember I documented the same thing for Pie charts a while back. Applying the same principles I started looking for the right elements to use in place of PieLabel - how about 'ColLabel' ... nope, not there, there is a ColLabels but thats no use. After a lot of frustration I came up with an idea this morning to load the DTD into XMLSpy and then convert it to a schema. XMLSpy has a nice expand and collapse feature for schemas that lets you see dependencies, etc. Within 2 mins I had the code I needed! 

So if you need to control the number format of your bar values then just add:

<MarkerText visible="true">
<Y1ViewFormat>
<ViewFormat decimalDigit="0" decimalSeparatorUsed="true" decimalDigitUsed="true"/>
</Y1ViewFormat>
</MarkerText>

under the <Graph> tag ... boo ya!