setting colorlist in pie chart

[Guest]

I built a likert survey with a scale of 1 to 5 - the old strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree thing. There are 20 statements in the likert survey. I am displaying the results in a pie chart using cfchart. The following is more of an annoyance than a problem. I have set my colorlist to be Yellow, Red, Green, Blue, Purple. This is great if each statement has a full range of responses of 1-5. Yellow will represent strongly disagree, Red - disagree, green- neutral, etc. However, if everyone responded to a statement with a 4 or 5, and there are no 1, 2, or 3's, then Yellow will represent Agree and Red - strongly agree for that question. Is there anyway to set the colorlist so that yellow will always represent strongly disagree? Here's a link to the results of the survey:

http://www.nyk12schools.com/results.cfm

If you scroll down, you'll see what I am talking about.

Thanks for the response and help.

Laurie

[-__cfSearching__-]

One option is to determine the chart colors inside your query using a CASE statement. If you have several queries that utilize these same chart colors, you may wish to consider storing the colors in a database table instead.

<cfquery name="getResponses" ...>
SELECT CASE WHEN ResponseText = 'Strongly Agree' THEN 'Purple'
WHEN ResponseText = 'Agree' THEN 'blue'
WHEN ResponseText = 'Strongly Disagree' THEN 'red'
WHEN ResponseText = 'Disagree' THEN 'Yellow'
WHEN ResponseText = 'Neutral/No Opinion' THEN 'Green'
END AS ResponseColor,
... OtherColumns ...
FROM YourTable
WHERE ...
</cfquery>

Then pass the color list to your cfchartseries tag

<cfchartseries
type="pie"
query="getResponses"
colorlist="#valueList(getResponses.responseColor)#"
...
/>

[Guest]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! It was such an easy solution, but I guess I couldn't see the forest through the trees. I decided to put the colors in a database table I already had and presto, got the colors I wanted. I have to give a presentation using these pie charts next month. This will make it so much easier to read and understand. Thanks again!

Laurie

[-__cfSearching__-]

Yes, it is nice when there is a simple solution. I am glad I could help :)

[Guest]

An FYI for anyone searching the forum for answers on how to use colors from a database to set the colorlist in a pie chart. Make sure you use the valuelist function.

For example, in your pie chart use colorlist="#valuelist(query.column)#"