Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 – Business Chart explained

In this blog, I’m going to talk about Business Charts in detail and how you can create them from scratch.

Building Business Charts is one of the ways you can take advantage of the powerful charting capabilities in Dynamics NAV.

Please refer to my previous blog post (Building Charts in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2) to know about different ways of building charts in NAV.

 

WHAT ARE BUSINESS CHARTS?

Business charts are based on Business Chart control add-in which is provided by the Microsoft.Dynamics.Nav.Client.BusinessChart.dll assembly. More details about Displaying the Charts using Chart control add-in here

 

As compared to other chart types, Business charts provide advanced functionalities such as:

  • Displaying complex data that is calculated on a page.
  • Allowing end users to filter data and drill down to the details from the chart
  • Allowing dynamic filtering of data
  • Being supported on Dynamics NAV Web client.

 

EXPLORE EXISTING BUSINESS CHARTS:

Out of the box, in the Cronus demo database, there are a few business charts available such as Trailing sales orders, Cash flow chart, Finance performance, Sales performance, Inventory performance etc.. These charts can be used on Role centers or along with pages.

For ex, In the Cronus demo database, when we login with President’s profile, we can view multiple business charts as shown below:

Business charts on President RoleCenter

 

Tips:

  • If you’re not able to see these charts on the President role center, you can add them by using Customize this page option.
  • Once added, if there is nothing shown on these graphs, change the filters using Select Chart or Show buttons on these charts.
  • When the chart is displayed, click on the chart to experience the drill down functionality.
  • Experience interactive features using Period Length, group by, Start Date and other options on these charts.
  • Each of these charts are nothing but a CardPart pages at the backend.

BUILDING BUSINESS CHARTS FROM SCRATCH

At the end of this blog, you will know how to build a simple Business chart which can be used as a factbox in the Item list page showing location wise Inventory. This chart updates automatically when you move to any particular line on the item list page.

Location wise Inventory

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