Charts are a great way to help users visualize data. Occassionally, however, there can be too much information or certain types of information that just end up making a chart too busy for the end user to quickly get useful information out of it. To help solve this challenge, Visual Builder September release offers a declarative way to aggregate data within a chart.

Let’s look at a specific use case. Suppose we are as sales organization that need to track expenses related to a customer. With Visual Builder we quickly created a tabular format to edit and view the expense information but now we want to visualize that with charts.

With several customers(opportunities) and expenses this information can get unwieldy very fast. So let’s look at visualization with charts. Visual Builder provides several chart types: Bar, Line, Area, Pie, Funnel, Donut, and Bubble.

Dropping a Pie chart onto the form allows me to select the business object (Expenses), the Slices values (Amount), and the Slice Colors (Category). Notice how busy the chart gets with several entries.

Let’s look at some aggregation options. An obvious one would be to aggregate the individual Category entries to get the total sum by Category. This will provide a similar chart as above but with only 4 entries, one per Category.

Another interesting way to aggregate would be to look at the Expenses over a certain time period. Let’s use a bar chart for that and look at the difference between showing all expenses with a date vs aggregating for a time period, like every quarter.

So, in summary, there are several types of aggregations you can use on Charts now; Average, Count, Minimum, Maximum, and Total. And depending on the Group by field you may be able to further organize your data, like by quarter, month, or year, with a Date field.