Salesforce Customization- Create custom graphs -charts using Visualforce Development

Author

mirketa

August 13, 2014

Recently I worked on projects where I had to customize the standard graph elements to create an engaging experience on the consumer portal. In this post, I will be sharing my experience with Salesforce data visualization and charting.

Pranshu Goyal, Director of Products at Mirekta, states: “We envision DSM to be used by every small to a medium-sized organization dealing with bad data and want to get rid of duplicates easily with no cost. We have faced issues dealing with duplicates in our organization. That inspired us to make a solution that is not only simple to use but can be used widely to make the organization’s data clean to make them more efficient and productive. We want DSM to be a solution for every organization looking for duplicate management capability better than the Salesforce out-of-the-box solution with no additional cost.”

Custom Charts

If you are not happy with the default charts, you can create your own custom charts. However, creating charts from scratch requires substantial scripting work. It can be a pain in the b***t to ensure that the charts work fine on different browsers. I recommend customizing standard charts offered by other provides. Try some of the JS based charts that can be customized in the Visualforce environment.
There are plenty of options available online. Unfortunately, most are paid. I liked the objects offered by JQchart, primarily because they are FREE! jqChart takes advantage of HTML5 Canvas to deliver high performance client-side charts and graphs across browsers (IE 6+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari) and devices, including iOS and Android mobile devices. As full disclosure, I don’t get paid by jqChart. :).
Here are a couple of sample charts from jqChart that I used for our custom work. To these graphs, we made some functional and visual changes.

Custom Charts Built from Scratch

The following are the examples of other charts that my colleagues built from scratch for our financial planning product. As I said before, we spent a lot on time making sure that these graphs worked fine on different browsers. So I don’t recommend building Salesforce Charts from scratch unless you have no other option.