Legend...wait for it...nope, that's all - legend.

Posted by Sonoma Partners on June 22, 2012  |  Comments (1)

Today's guest blogger is Jacob Cynamon-Murphy, a Technical Specialist at Sonoma Partners

Barney Stinson is not the only person who cares about things being legendary.  I was building out a demo of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (CRM) and I created what I considered a pretty cool chart.  Much to my chagrin, the legend was showing in the reverse order (see Before image, below).

I scoured the internet for guidance, but found that there was no documentation going this deep into customizing the legend of a chart in CRM.  Ultimately, my past developer experience helped me dig up the way to do this (see After image, below).  By adding one attribute to the Legend element, I was able to reverse the order.

Technical explanation: Behind the scenes, CRM is mapping a declarative model (XML) to an imperative model (.NET).  The XML appears to reflect the structure of the Chart class in the System.Web.UI.DataVisualization namespace.  As a result, we can discover additional elements and attributes that we can use in the chart XML to control the presentation of the chart elements.  Empowered with this knowledge, I now know exactly where to go for more control over my CRM charts.  For example, with the Legend change I made, I found the Legend class had a property called LegendItemOrder, with three options: Auto, SameAsSeriesOrder and ReversedSeriesOrder.  Knowing that I wanted to reverse the order that CRM was using, I defined LegendItemOrder as an attribute with a value of "ReversedSeriesOrder".  Legend… wait for it… dary!