Charts
Charts are one of the more impactful data visualization widgets in terms of QA/QC and monitoring your sensor feeds. They allow you to display both live and historic data and also provide the ability to bundle up sequential values in boxes for quick review with minimal performance impact.
Designing the Widget
Click the Charts group in the Manage My Widgets panel then click the +Create New Chart button on top of the grid.
Enter the standard information for widget creation including a name, description, any keywords and permission level you wish this template to have and hit OK.
This will bring you to the editor for this widget.
Charts are so commonly used that not much explanation is required for you to understand the concept. Essentially each data feed you wish to display is setup as a Series. As values come in for a series they are put onto the screen with the vertical axis representing the value and the horizontal representing some other value (default is time). If the Chart is a Line chart then the sequential points are connected via a line segment. An optional second vertical axis can also be used if multiple series do not share a common range (eg SOG and COG, both are numeric but if displayed on the same axis then most likely the COG would flatten the SOG since it ranges all the way up to 360).
The Chart builder is very straightforward. Many of the options are available during run time instead (such as displaying as a box chart, a line chart or a scatter chart). You can choose to use the colors assigned via the selected SCS theme (this applies to the series as well), set the primary/secondary axis text and add 1 or more data feeds you wish to display.
If one of your Series is on a secondary axis then that axis will be displayed at run time. If all of your Series are on the primary axis then the secondary axis will be hidden at run time.
Run Time
Once you have defined your Chart widget it can be added to a Widget Group and displayed on Layout.
As you move your cursor over the Chart you will notice cross hairs appear which tell you the value on each axis. Additionally, if you hover over a point, you can see the value for a given series under the mouse.
You can left click to "drag" your chart (when in run mode) left and right. This allows you to scroll back and forth in time to load historic data for your selected series.
You may use your mouse when to zoom in and out as well, this changes the total time frame being displayed. Be aware if you zoom out you may start to incur performance penalties as large quantities of data don't always play nice with web-based charting.
If you right click on the Chart you will be presented with a context menu which allows you to change some basic settings on your chart while it's running.
The first option lets you change your chart into a Box Plot
The second changes your Chart into a scatter/line chart. To see/hide the line be sure to click the Toggle Line option as well
To view live data (if you've scrolled into the past) click Live on the menu to go back to the current feed
Box Plots
The idea of Box Plots came about to resolve the long standing issue of a large number of data points bringing most charts to their knees in terms of performance. Instead, groups of datapoints (size of the group is determined by the Box pot duration value) are displayed as "Boxes". This method of presentation will allow you to see the general values of the series, including any outliers, without having to plot each individual point. More details (and the image above) can be found here - https://www.simplypsychology.org/boxplots.html
By plotting in boxes, you can quickly see the general trend of your series over time and should any min/max values appear to be erroneous you can zoom into them to view the scatter/line chart instead for finer details.
If you hover your mouse over a box you will get a tooltip showing you the data making up the box (eg your min/max, etc)
