Reporting with Toad for DB2 Part 2 – Graphic Reports
In this second part of the article we will continue with using the graphic report capabilities in Toad for DB2. For this example we have a query which gives the summarized revenue for each month of a year. We want to have a chart which visualizes the revenue over the time.
On marked rows in the data tab of a table, view, MQT, data grid of query results or directly on those objects itself you can right click, select “Send to” and “Chart Designer”:
![]()
Like creating data reports a wizard will guide you through the process of designing your graphic report. It starts with a choice of 50 chart types: bar, point and line, pie series and so on.
![]()
On the left and side you see all the different steps to design your report.
![]()
For now we select a line chart, just double click on it:
![]()
In the “appearance” screen you can select the colors of the lines, the background and the line points. You can do this by selecting a set of harmonizing colors. The graph is directly changed into the selected color scheme.
The next step defines the displayed series, actually the lines which you can see: how many lines and how they are displayed. There are quite a lot of options which can be configured. Note that most of them are determined by the data you bind to the series and the wizard configured them itself. So there is no need for you to configure them. Which data or better which column belongs to the series and is bound to which axis is configured in the next step.
In the data step we bind the data to the series. This is probably the most important step because we now assign the columns to x-axis and to the y-axis of our graph. Within the tab “Series Binding” we have a list of our series/lines (in our example just one line). In the “Argument Properties” area we select the column which is bound to x-axis. In our case the timeline is represented by the column “MONTH”.
![]()
To specify the y-axis we have to select the column in the “Value Properties” area. In the example we select the revenue column.
![]()
We now finished the data specification and can verify out configuration under the points tab and of course in the next step “Chart” we see already our graph.
![]()
![]()
In the above “Chart” dialogue you can define the background options like color and style and adjust the size of the frame. In the following steps a lot of design options can be specified: the name of the chart, a legend, point labels which contain the value or comments. After clicking the “Finish” button you can do also some designing around that chart, i.e. add your company logo. The completed report can be saved and also be sent as a mail attachment in different formats like PDF.
More ...
