View data with visualizations (charts)

Article
07/22/2016

Applies To: Dynamics CRM 2015

Visualizations let you see your business data graphically. A visualization is attached to an entity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can attach multiple visualizations to an entity, however, only one visualization can be displayed at a time along-side a grid. You can view multiple visualizations at the same time by using a dashboard. More information: Analyze data with dashboards

You can use a chart or a web resource as a visualization in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For charts, you can use the chart designer in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. However, to use a web resource in a visualization, you must either use the SDK or import a custom visualization XML into Microsoft Dynamics CRM. More information: Sample: Create, retrieve, update, and delete a chart

In This Topic

Visualization ownership

Chart visualizations

Web resource visualizations

Entities supported for visualizations

Visualization ownership

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM, there are two types of visualization ownership: organization-owned and user-owned.

An organization-owned visualization is owned by an organization, and cannot be assigned or shared. The SavedQueryVisualization entity represents the organization-owned visualization. These visualizations are solution-aware entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Whenever you update a saved query visualization, you must publish the changes for the updates to be available across the organization by using the PublishAllXmlRequest message. This entity is referred to as a System Chart in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM web application.
A user-owned visualization is owned by an individual user, and can be assigned and shared with other users and teams. The UserQueryVisualization entity represents the user-owned visualization. This entity is referred to as a User Chart in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM web application, and is displayed under My Charts in the chart drop-down list.

A user query visualization is not associated with a user query (view), despite the entity name. The view aspect of this entity is used only for setting the filter criteria.

Chart visualizations

Charts let you see summaries of grid data. The charts are built by using the Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. For more information about Microsoft Chart Controls, see Download: Chart Controls for .NET Framework.

These charts are integrated with the grids in the web application. When you apply a filter (query) to the data in a grid, the filter is applied to the chart also, and the chart is updated accordingly. Similarly, when you perform drill-down operations on a chart, the grid data is updated automatically.

A chart attached to an entity is available for all the views for the entity. A chart displays data according to the currently selected (or displayed) view of an entity. A chart can display data from both a saved query (organization-owned view) and a user query (user-owned view).

Charts display data for only those saved queries (organization-owned views) that use FetchXML (SavedQuery.FetchXml attribute) to filter the records. If a saved query uses the query API (SavedQuery.QueryAPI attribute) to filter the records, the chart will not appear for that saved query. This limitation is not applicable for user queries (user-owned views) because the user query entity does not use the QueryAPI attribute to filter the records.

For more information about how to work with charts, see Understand charts: Underlying data and chart representation.

Chart types in Microsoft chart controls

Microsoft Chart Controls is used to build charts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Microsoft Chart Controls enable you to create various chart types such as column, bar, area, stacked, line, bubble, and pie.

The following chart types are supported out-of-box in Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Column, Area, Bar, Line, Pie, and Funnel. However, you can extend the functionality by creating other supported Microsoft Chart Controls chart types such as multi-series, stacked, and 100% stacked (comparison) charts by using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK. This is done by specifying appropriate content in the data description and presentation description XML strings for a chart. More information: Understand charts: Underlying data and chart representation

Web resource visualizations

Web resources are virtual files that are stored in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM database and may be retrieved using a unique URL address. You can display an existing web resource as a visualization, and display it in the Charts area in Microsoft Dynamics CRM together with other charts for an entity. For more information about web resources, see Web resources for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

You can use the following types of web resources in a visualization: Webpage (HTML) web resources and Image (JPG, PNG, GIF, ICO) web resources. For more information about how to create a visualization with a web resource, see Create a web resource visualization.

Entities supported for visualizations

You can create and attach visualizations to only those entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM that support the new ribbon interface. This is because all of the chart controls are only present in the ribbon interface of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015. Custom entities are also supported for visualizations. You can turn off the visualization support for custom entities if you want to. However, you cannot disable visualization support for the default entities.

The following lists the default entities that are supported for visualizations.

Account
ActivityPointer
Appointment
BulkOperation
Campaign
CampaignActivity
CampaignResponse
Competitor
Connection
Contact
Contract
Email
Entitlement
EntitlementChannel
EntitlementTemplateChannel
Fax
Goal
GoalRollupQuery
Incident
Invoice
InvoiceDetail
KbArticle
Lead
Letter
List
Mailbox
Metric
Opportunity
OpportunityProduct
PhoneCall
Position
PriceLevel
Product
ProductAssociation
ProductSubstitute
QueueItem
Quote
QuoteDetail
RecurringAppointmentMaster
Report
SalesLiterature
SalesOrder
SalesOrderDetail
Service
ServiceAppointment
SLAKPIInstance
SocialActivity
SocialProfile
SystemUser
Task
Team
Territory
UoMSchedule

Share via

View data with visualizations (charts)

In This Topic

Visualization ownership

Chart visualizations

Chart types in Microsoft chart controls

Web resource visualizations

Entities supported for visualizations

See Also

Additional resources