Friday, August 20, 2010

Hyperion Reports - Combo Chart

When working in Hyperion Financial Reporting Studio with charts there is an option for a Combo Chart, which is a Bar-Line Combination Chart. The functionality isn’t as robust as Excel, which is to be expected. I did however find a quirky item or two that had to be worked around to get the graph to render correctly.

The chart is built off a grid within the report for this example and the graph should represent Sales on the bars and Marketing, Payroll, and Misc on the lines. After building the grid, insert a chart and select the Combo Chart Type for your grid. Select which Row(s) and Column(s) your bar data should represent and which Row(s) and Column(s) your lines should represent in the Chart Properties box. The set up looks like this:
The resulting report appears as follows, with the Sales bar and Marketing line being the same color. When trying to adjust the color of one, both were adjusted. This is due to the fact that both are considered DataSet1. Sales is DataSet1 for the bar and Marketing is DataSet1 for the lines.

The next attempt was to try to select both Rows for the line data range.  In the resulting report, the graph now appears as expected, but the legend shows Sales as both a bar and a line (both of which are the same color). There is no sales line on the report, but the legend is confusing.
After some further tinkering I found no use in adding a text row between Sales and Marketing, but did find success with adding a formula row between the Sales and Marketing rows in the grid. The formula row was set to Hide Always so it will not appear in the grid and was selected as one of the rows in the Line Data Range. The new setup looks like this:

Finally, the report and chart appear as expected with different colors for each bar and line and without duplication in the chart legend.

I doubt this was the intended functionality of this feature, but at least there is a work around that gets to the correct end result.

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