In this blog post we will take a closer look at some best practice recommendations to optimize your chart visualizations when using Bar charts. Using NetCharts, the style and look of each chart type such as Bar charts can be customized using our Chart Definition Laungauge (CDL) and its functionality controlled.

While every element of charts produced by NetCharts can be customized and controlled, with countless combinations allowing you to build a chart exactly the way you want, the chart itself consists of many parts that are shared and used across the different chart types.

In this blog post we will guide you through the simple steps of enabling the required CDL parameters in your chart template using NetCharts Designer. Including these parameters to any chart type that has the Legend enabled, will allow you to interact with the chart by hovering the pointer over the legend items and the corresponding lines, bars or slices will change colors.

By default the popup labels (Dwell or Active Label) for both Bars and Lines are enabled when you hover over them in a Combo chart. However, you might have a particular requirement where you need to switch off the Active Labels for the Bars but need the Active Labels to remain for the Line data points.

Visual Mining product’s core rendering engines share the same Chart Definition Language (CDL) language. While CDL is a text based language, NetCharts Designer offers a user interface with wizards and menus to design and style the charts, removing the need to learn CDL.

You may have read about CDL on our site and in the documentation and wondered what it is and stands for. Our Chart Definition Language or CDL is a collection of plain text parameters that describe a chart.

You may have a requirement where you need to show the individual values of each segment in a stacked bar instead of the totals.

The CDL parameter StackLabel offers control over the display of the segment bar values and the value in the active label hover popups for stacked bar charts. Options allow for either the aggregate value of the stack or the individual stack segment value to be presented in the label.