time series axis labels behaviour strange

Jonas De Beukelaer shared this problem 5 years ago
Resolved

Hey,

The axis labelling for time axes doesn't look great, especially when there are not many data points, such as this:

where there are three months displayed (April/May/Jun). Could the labels be centred on the columns?


Thanks,


Jonas

Replies (5)

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Hi Jonas,

Thanks for reaching out. Turning on Time Series does indeed push the date values to the beginning of the data set per tick. However, if you turn Time Series to Default or Off, this should no longer be the case:

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If you need Time Series turned on for your use case, what you could do instead is turn off the Legend under Legend > Legend Position > set to None, then turn off "Show Axis" under Chart Axis > Horizontal > Style:

Then click the "+" icon in the bottom right to turn this into a multi-chart canvas. Then in the design stage add this chart into the canvas and add text boxes under your data set.

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And of course just format, size and place the label as you see fit. Hopefully one of these are a viable solution for you here!

Regards,

Mike

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hey Mike,

Yes unfortunately I do need the time axis functionality.

And I can't apply the values manually as otherwise I'd have to manually update it every month.

Is this something that could get fixed? Or would it be too low a priority?


Thanks,

Jonas

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Hi Jonas,

I dug into this a little bit and it turns out that this has been discussed before and is unlikely to see any action. As a note on this, depending on your data set, the labels will display a bit differently.

This following is all from another ticket where the issue was, like yours, the labels move to the sides, but in their case they had the labels at a 45 degree angle and based on their data set, this was additionally causing the labels to actually be cut-off a bit on the edges, i.e., it wasn't displaying perfectly. Anyways:

"We have had a few discussions with the dev team on this, and unfortunately the issue here is actually related to the charting library (JFree)we use.

The way it works is that, when first creating your chart, it looks at your data and does it's best to draw the charting area to ensure it all fits. However it does not always check every single label (to save on performance time). There is no straight forward way to get around this with the library, there are ways for us to create our own functions, but we're talking about a large time-sink of dev time for this, and honestly for the amount of times we see this issue, the effort vs result just does not line up."

The suggestions for this client wound up being things you've already done (shorter date name, rotating 90 degrees). Then of course there's my suggested workaround, which of course requires manual work. I was hoping parameter replacements could work for the month, but that functionality is too limited to get you a series of date data like that. Beyond my work around, you could code your own chart using JS charts, though that's obviously considerably more involved and requires JavaScript knowledge. I also mention the above quote because there are a couple other Time Series labeling issues logged that are marked as Won't Do and it's all because of the library being used. Unfortunately, sometimes the data you're using just won't look as pretty as other cases when using Time Series. Sorry there's not much more we can do here!

Regards,

Mike

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Hey Mike,

Thanks for looking into it. I see, probably not worth it then! The issue tends to disappear as more data points are generated with time anyway, so it's not a huge issue, just that it's been called out by clients of ours, so I thought I'd mention it!

And yeah js charts are an idea, but probably not worth it for simple reports like this one.

Cheers,

Jonas

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Hi Jonas,

You're welcome. I've noticed that as well. Always worth a shout out as you never what could be come up with! I'll go ahead and mark this Resolve as there's nothing much else we can do here, but please don't hesitate to reach out with further questions or concerns.

Regards,

Mike

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