How to Easily Bring Graphical Charts into your CRM?

There is no doubt that nothing communicates better and faster than graphics with users. It has been always the case that users fail to utilize software solutions merely because the information is not delivered to them intuitively, comprehensively and graphically.

Managers often require summarized business critical information quick and easy to grasp. Utilizing charts in Web Applications has been a challenge for many of us over the past two decade and now it is all much easier than ever!

Google Chart is an excellent tool available for free! It is actually very easy to work with and practical.

In this article I will demonstrate how you can utilize this outstanding component to bring new life to your Salesforce pages!

Example: I have a requirement to create a Visualforce page to view a pie chart that shows number of Accounts in our organization divided by their Types.


Here is how it works:
The Google Chart API requires me to pass the chart information via URL parameters and then in return Google will send me an image in PNG format. Then all I need to do is to view the image using the HTML img tag!

Ingredients:
Chart Server URL: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart
Parameters List:

• chs: is in fact the chart size in pixels ex: 300x200
• chd: you will need to pass the chart data using this parameter. ex: t:60,40
• cht: chart type, ex: p3
• chl: chart items' label, ex: Data 1|Data 2
  

The above are all basic required parameters in order to create charts. So there is more to it if you are interested.

So in order to utilize this component I create a Visualforce page as follows:

<apex:page controller="googleChartCon" tabStyle="Account">
<apex:sectionHeader title="Accounts by Type"></apex:sectionHeader>
<apex:image url="{!chartData}"></apex:image>
</apex:page>

This page only contains an apex:image component which talks to the controller to obtain it's image URL.

The URL is where the magic happens so we will need to focus on that.

In order to do this I first need to get a list of Account's "Type" picklist values and then
in my custom controller, I create an internal Apex class to save the chart's data while I am running through Account's records and find out how many of which type we have in our database.

public class googleChartCon {
private String chartData;

public String getChartData()inter
{
 return chartData;
}

public googleChartCon()
{
 //obtain a list of picklist values
 Schema.DescribeFieldResult F = Account.Type.getDescribe();
 List<Schema.PicklistEntry> P = F.getPicklistValues();
 //where chart data should be stored.
 List<ChartDataItem> items = new List<ChartDataItem>();

 //iterate through each picklist value and get number of accounts
 // I wish we could do GROUP BY in SOQL!
 for(Schema.PicklistEntry pValue : P)
 {
    integer Count = [select count() from Account where Type = :pValue.getValue() limit 10000];
    if (Count > 0)
      items.add(new ChartDataItem(pValue.getValue()+ '-['+ Count.format() + ']' , Count.format()));
 }

 //Prepare the chart URL
 String chartPath = 'http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=600x200&cht=p3';
 chartData = chartPath +  getChartData(items);
}

private String getChartData(List<ChartDataItem> items)
{
 String chd = ''; //23,34,56
 String chl = ''; //Hello|World

 for(ChartDataItem citem : items)
 {
    chd += citem.ItemValue + ',';
    chl += citem.Label + '|';
 }
 //remove the last comma or pipe
 chd = chd.substring(0, chd.length() -1);
 chl = chl.substring(0, chl.length() -1);

 String result = '&chd=t:' + chd + '&chl=' + chl;
 return result;
}

public class ChartDataItem
{
 public String ItemValue
 {
  get;
  set;
 }

 public String Label
 {
   get;
   set;
 }

 public ChartDataItem(String Label, String Value)
 {
    this.Label = Label;
    this.ItemValue = Value;
 }


}

}

For some security might be a concern sending the data via URL parameters.
Up to this point, I have not been able to confirm if Google is officially supporting SSL connections to rectify this problem. However the following seems to be fine:

https://www.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World


In this article I have barely scratched the surface of Google Charts API, if you are interested to learn more about it go to http://code.google.com/apis/chart/