Building a line chart for cost breakdown from a virtual attribute

[kpr]

Hello,

 

I had a question as it pertains to building a chart portlet.

 

I currently have created a financial portlet that displays the actual and planned costs for a given project as well as a month by month breakdown of those costs as a virtual attribute. The users input their planned and actual dollar amounts for each month as numbers in the portlet.

 

Since this breakdown is a time scaled value and virtual attribute showing each month's value, my question would be, what steps could I take to create a line graph from this same information that the users input? The goal of this line chart is to show the planned cost and actual cost as they relate each month and since this attribute is virtual, I am unable to choose it from the layout options when constructing a chart.

 

Thank you.

[Legacy User]

I think you'd have to write a query that would break up your time periods into distinct values. So you'd have a column in your query called "Month", one for "Actual Cost", and one for "Planned Cost". You could definitely write the query to be dynamic - for example, go back 6 months from today as your starting point and go forward 6 months into the future for a total of 12 months on your chart. It might be possible to make the query even more dynamic using some custom parameters that you pull from the portlet (start date/end date for example).