Creating a Graph

The cfgraph tag provides five graph types. A large number of attributes let you customize the graph appearance to meet your needs.

Graph types

You can create the following types of graphs:

Bar
Horizontal bar
Line
Area (a line graph with the area below the line filled in)
Pie

The following illustrations show one sample of each type of graph:

Creating a basic graph

You use the following cfgraph attributes to create a basic graph:

Attribute

Description

type
Must be one of the following values: bar, horizontalbar, pie, or line. (An area graph is a kind of line graph.)

query
The query containing the data.

valueColumn
The query column containing the values to be graphed.

itemColumn
(Optional) The query column containing the description for this data point. The item normally appears on the horizontal axis of bar and line graphs, and in pie charts.

Attribute	Description
type	Must be one of the following values: `bar`, `horizontalbar`, `pie`, or `line`. (An area graph is a kind of line graph.)
query	The query containing the data.
valueColumn	The query column containing the values to be graphed.
itemColumn	(Optional) The query column containing the description for this data point. The item normally appears on the horizontal axis of bar and line graphs, and in pie charts.

You must end your cfgraph tag with a </cfgraph> end tag.

For example, if you have a query that contains average salary by department, the following tag displays a bar graph with the information:

<cfgraph type="bar" 

query="DataTable" 

valueColumn="AvgByDept" 

itemColumn="Dept_Name">

</cfgraph>

The resulting graph looks like this:

Later sections in this chapter provide information on how you can specify the data differently and how you can change and enhance graph appearance.

Developing ColdFusion Applications
Graphing Data