I have a stacked column which displays the traffic to a web site from various sources (referrals, advertising, etc). Each stack represents a single week, and the different stacked series therein represents a source. I created a custom renderer to have a label within the actual chart element itself, to show the source name and percentage, and a custom datatip renderer as well to show the underlying raw data as well as inviting the user to click for more info (displayed in a separate component).
Some of the sources may only have a very small percentage of the overall traffic. These are displayed as very thin hairlines, which are difficult or impossible to click and sometimes not even visible. I have tried setting the 'minHeight' attribute of the ColumnSeries, but that seems to be geared towards floating columns and in any case does not seem to be used for stacked and 100% type charts. What I want is for the stacked elements to have a minimum size which is large enough for a label and for clicking. These would not be representative of the actual data, though it should be for larger chart elements. I don't think I can accomplish this with a ChartItemRenderer, since the parameters which are passed to it are the already-determined height and width. I can think of two ways to accomplish this, and would love to hear feedback on them as well as more suggestions if you have any. The first is to create a 'shadow series' which contains modified data which will draw the chart elements at a large enough size. Since I already have custom renderers for the chart item and datatip, these could know how to correlate this with the real data, and show the correct percentages/numbers/etc. The second idea I had was to create a custom non-chart component. Since the labeled-state is actually a zoom-in on a single week (i.e., only one column is shown at a time), the component could essentially have the real data as its dataprovider, but could calculate the total and dynamically make small items large enough to be seen. The drawback to this is that I lose the datatip functionality, and it might be difficult to access the chart styles to make it visually match the four-column (zoomed out) display. (I suppose a third idea would be to display in a table, not a chart: but the client is not going to go for that.) Any comments would be appreciated. oliver
