Visualforce Charting

What is Visualforce Charting?

Visualforce charting gives you an easy way to create customized business charts, based on data sets you create directly from SOQL queries, or by building the data set in your own Apex code. By combining and configuring individual data series, you can compose charts that display your data in ways meaningful to your organization.

Visualforce charts are rendered client-side using JavaScript. This allows charts to be animated and visually exciting, and chart data can load and reload asynchronously, which can make the page feel more responsive.

Why Would You Use Visualforce Charting?

Use Visualforce charting when the standard Salesforce charts and dashboards are insufficient, or when you wish to compose custom pages that combine charts and data tables in ways that are more useful to your organization.

Alternatives to Visualforce Charting

Salesforce provides a number of dashboards and reports, which support a variety of business charts. These charts can be simpler to create and customize because they do not require programming in Visualforce or Apex.

Visualforce charting is designed to be flexible, but also easy to use. It offers variations on bar, line, area, and pie charts commonly used in business graphics, as well as radar, gauge, and scatter charts for more specialized charting. If you need different chart types, or want to add advanced user or page interactions, you might want to investigate using a JavaScript charting library instead. This is more work, but allows greater customization. Using JavaScript in Visualforce Pages provides more information about how to use JavaScript libraries with Visualforce.