Thursday, 27 February 2014

BI Publisher 11g - Setting a Background colour on charts



I've recently been asked how to set the background of a chart in BI Publisher to a gradient colour when using the Word Template builder. There is very little documentation on how to do this, and what there is doesn't seem to work properly, so here's how.

Using the Word template builder create the basic chart you want, here's mine:



The background colour isn't in the list of properties when editing the chart, so we need to use the advanced tab of the chart edit screen:



We need to insert a new tag here for "PlotArea" after the Graph tag:
<PlotArea borderColor="#000000" fillColor="#D0DCEC" borderTransparent="true" fillTransparent="false" />




The chart now looks appears as:



There are four parameters on the PlotArea tag:

borderColor: The colour you want to use for the border, in hex, e.g. "#000000" 

fillColor: The colour you want to use for the background, in hex, e.g. "#D0DCEC" 

borderTransparent :  Determines if the border is transparent - the borderColor setting only applies if this is set to "false".

fillTransparent: Determines if the background is transparent - the fillColor setting only applies if this is set to "false"

Now we have a background colour set, we can go a stage further and set a gradient wash:

 

To do this we need to use a sub-tag of PlotArea: SFX. The SFX tag has three parameters:

fillType: this can be set to FT_GRADIENT, FT_COLOR or FT_TEXTURE.

gradientDirection: this can be any of the follow directional options: GD_RIGHT, GD_LEFT, GD_DOWN, GD_UP, GD_DOWN_LEFT, GD_UP_LEFT, GD_DIAGONAL_45, GD_DIAGONAL_135, GD_DOWN_RIGHT, GD_UP_RIGHT, GD_RADIAL, GD_RADIAL_TOP_LEFT, GD_RADIAL_TOP_RIGHT, GD_RADIAL_BOTTOM_LEFT or  GD_RADIAL_BOTTOM_RIGHT

gradientNumStops: This tells the chart how many gradient colour changes to perform. A setting of 2 performs one gradient change from one colour to a second (hence 2). 3 would allow a gradient change from one colour to a second and then on to a third. (there's an example of this below).

so our SFX tag will be:
<SFX fillType="FT_GRADIENT" gradientDirection="GD_RIGHT" gradientNumStops="2">

The SFX tag has a sub-tag of GradientStopStyle, and you need one of these for each stop. As we've specificed 2 stops, we need 2 GradientStopStyle tags:

 <GradientStopStyle stopIndex="0" gradientStopPosition="0.0" gradientStopColor="#D0DCEC"/>
 <GradientStopStyle stopIndex="1" gradientStopPosition="100.0" gradientStopColor="#FFFFFF"/>

These tell the chart the order of the gradient colour changes, the percentage of the chart then should cover and the colour they should end up as.

The first tag sets the initial colour, in this case #D0DCEC. 

The second tag sets the colour to change to and how far across the chart it should go, in this case cover the whole chart (100%) and change the colour to white (#FFFFFF). So the whole PlotArea tag group would now be:

<PlotArea borderColor="#000000" fillColor="#D0DCEC" borderTransparent="true" fillTransparent="false">
<SFX fillType="FT_GRADIENT" gradientDirection="GD_RIGHT" gradientNumStops="2">
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="0" gradientStopPosition="0.0" gradientStopColor="#D0DCEC"/>
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="1" gradientStopPosition="100.0" gradientStopColor="#FFFFFF"/>
</SFX>
</PlotArea>

Paste this into the Advanced tab of the edit chart screen to see the chart above.

To enhance this we can add additional stops. The following tag has 3 stops and a down gradient:

<PlotArea   borderColor="#000000" borderTransparent="true" fillTransparent="false">
<SFX fillType="FT_GRADIENT" gradientDirection="GD_RIGHT" gradientNumStops="3">
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="0" gradientStopPosition="0.0" gradientStopColor="#D0DCEC"/>
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="1" gradientStopPosition="50.0" gradientStopColor="#FFFFFF"/>
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="2" gradientStopPosition="100.0" gradientStopColor="#D0DCEC"/>
</SFX>
</PlotArea>

and produces this:



This sets the background of the chart area, but we can also set the background of the whole chart. The background tag sets this:
 
<Background fillColor="#D0DCEC"  fillTransparent="false"/>

Just like the PlotArea tag, filltransparent must be set to "false" for the fillColor to be active:



We can also use the same SFX sub-tag to set a gradient:

<Background fillColor="#D0DCEC"  fillTransparent="false">
<SFX fillType="FT_GRADIENT" gradientDirection="GD_RIGHT" gradientNumStops="2">
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="0" gradientStopPosition="0.0" gradientStopColor="#D0DCEC"/>
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="1" gradientStopPosition="100.0" gradientStopColor="#FFFFFF"/>
</SFX>
</Background>

produces:


 

and finally we can go one step further by having different settings for the PlotArea and the Background:

<Background fillColor="#D0DCEC"  fillTransparent="false">
<SFX fillType="FT_GRADIENT" gradientDirection="GD_RIGHT" gradientNumStops="2">
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="0" gradientStopPosition="0.0" gradientStopColor="#D0DCEC"/>
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="1" gradientStopPosition="100.0" gradientStopColor="#FFFFFF"/>
</SFX>
</Background>
<PlotArea borderTransparent="true" fillTransparent="false">
<SFX fillType="FT_GRADIENT" gradientDirection="GD_LEFT" gradientNumStops="2">
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="0" gradientStopPosition="0.0" gradientStopColor="#D0DCEC"/>
<GradientStopStyle stopIndex="1" gradientStopPosition="100.0" gradientStopColor="#FFFFFF"/>
</SFX>
</PlotArea>

Produces:







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