CFChart Pie problem

[ISLMEDIA]

When creating a pie from a database query, if 2 or more adjacent slices are
very small, say 1 or 2 percent, then the data labels will overlap each other
and be unreadable, no matter if they are inside or outside the pie. There seems
to no way to prevent this. Tried to create a custom chart style using the
WebCharts3D utility that comes with CFMX7 but there seems to be no option for
placement of the data labels other than inside or outside. Has anyone else
encountered this or found a solution?

[MikerRoo]

This is a limitation of the Webcharts engine and a common problem among
charting tools.

I assume you do not wish to use a different tool ($ or time).

Here are some techniques we've used to mitigate this problem:

1) Turn labels off -- User gets precise number in our own, external legend and
on rollover.

2) Use large chart size with small font size (6 or 8 px).

3) Aggregate small slices into an "Other" or "Misc." pie slice. Several
slivers become one "Misc." slice. The bigger and important things are still
shown seperately. We break out the details on drilldown and/or mouseover.

Cheers,
-- MikeR

[ISLMEDIA]

Thanks Mike,

Your first suggestion is what we're doing right now in CFMX6.1 I had hoped 7
would address this issue. No such luck.

Problem for us is that we often copy the web charts into Powerpoint for live
presentations and the client expects labels on all pies. So it seems for the
forseeable future we'll continue adding them manually. DotNetCharting has a
great graphing package which solves this problem elegantly, but it doesn't run
on CF as far as I can see, only ASP.net unless anyone knows otherwise. If we
could find a comparable charting engine that would work easily on CF we'd
switch in a heartbeat!

George

[PaulH]

we've used [url]http://www.ve.com/kavachart/[/url] in the past w/good results. java based, easy enough to integrate w/cf.

[MikerRoo]

Kava charts looks ok but it does not appear to support some of the
functionality that we needed.

Here are some products that do:
[url]http://www.avs.com/software/soft_t/gsharp.html[/url] --$10K! -- Outstanding power
and advanced plotting features. Must use Perl or Java to integrate.

These are all well proven in various departments of my company (all but mine
are Perl, Java or .net driven though).