How to control the order of items in a pie portlet

[Legacy User]

Hi,
I have a simple pie chart that shows the breakdown of projects by a status indicator. It is based on the project object. The values of the status indicator (a status lookup) are:
1-On Track

2-At Risk

3-Critical

In the lookup, the values are ordered as above.

I have set the color palette in System Options to be ordered Red, Yellow, Green, etc. so that this (and other similar) portlets have sensible colors for the values represented.

I would expect that the values would load in this order (since that is how they are ordered in the lookup), so that Green corresponds with 1-On Track, Yellow with 2-At Risk, Red with 3-Critical. The colors are loading in the proper order but not the values, so the values and colors do not match up (see attached screen shot). I have also set the sort column in the portlet options to this value, but it doesn't change anything.

Does anyone know how to set the order of values in a portlet?

[RolandP]

Have you specified the Sort Column in the portlet (found on Chart Section - Options)?  Just completed for one of our pie chart portlets which then sorted the pie chart and legend. 

 

In your case, you may also want to consider appending '0-' to the No Value Selected option, to make sure it appears in the correct location you want it to.

[Legacy User]

Hi Roland,
Thanks for the response. I meant to include this in the original post. I did set the sort column to my status indicator, and re-published. This did not have any effect; the items are still out of order.

[David Morton]

Strange ; my similar looking pie charts I can just specify the "sort column" and it comes out in the correct order (my sort column is just a numeric value).

 

One "gotcha" that you might come across is that in order to get consistent colors ; You have to provide 0 values for the metrics that are otherwise empty - e.g. to always get '3' to be the third color in your palette you always need to provide a value for '1' and '2' - even if they are zero (since if you don't then '3' becomes the second  (or first) value returned and so would come out in the wrong color) - sorry that sounds a bit confusing, but I hope you can get what I mean!  

[Legacy User]

Hi,
Came back to this after putting it on hold for a while. I do understand what you are saying. But this is only possible to do in query-based portlets, right?

[David Morton]

Sorry I don't know - don't think I have ever built a PIE portlet from a non-NSQL query data source.