Formatting the legend

Chart legend is a box to identify the patterns or colors assigned to the data categories in a chart. A chart legend may contain one or more legend entries, and each entry is composed of a mark and a label. You can show or hide the legend by right-clicking the chart and then selecting Show/Hide legend form the shortcut menu. An indicator chart whose values are represented by images and an org chart does not have the legend.

To format the legend of a chart:

1. Right-click any chart element and select Format Legend from the shortcut menu to bring up the Format Legend dialog.
2. In the Fill and Border tabs, set the fill and border modes for the legend (for details, refer to Formatting the platform).
3. In the Placement tab, specify the way in which the legend will be placed.

   In the Position box, specify whether the legend will be placed at the left, right, top, or bottom of the chart, and then set the alignment style accordingly in the Alignment box. If Auto is selected, the legend will be placed somewhere automatically.

   In the Legend-Label Gap box, specify the vertical and horizontal margins between the legend entries and the legend boundaries, and the vertical and horizontal spacing between legend entry labels.

   Check Reverse Legend if you want to have the legend entries re-arranged in a reverse order.

   Check Show Scrollbar if you want to show the legend scrollbar to fully view the legend content when the content does not fit into the legend.

   Check Truncate if you want to truncate the legend entry label text when the text overflow the labels.

4. In the Font tab, specify the font formats of the legend entry labels, including the font face, size, color, transparency, rotation angle, shearing angle, and effects such as style, strikeout, underline and so on.
5. In the Orientation tab, set an angle for legend entry labels so as to rotate them. You can either drag the Text hand in the Orientation box or type a value in the Angle spinner to set the angle.
6. In the Format tab, specify the data format of the legend entry labels. However, the settings in this tab take effect only when the property Label Format Source of the chart legend in the Report Inspector has been set to Legend Label Format.

   Select a category from the Category box, then select a format from the Format box and click Add to add it to the Stack box. You can add more than one format, and in the event that one of the formats is not necessary, you can clear it by clicking Remove.

7. In the Mark tab, specify the options for the legend entry marks.
   • By default, Customize is checked, which enables you to customize the format of the legend entry marks.

     JReport Designer uses 16 styles for the marks by default. To add a style, select a mark item from the Mark Items drop-down list, and then click to add it to the Mark Items box. The legend marks will repeat within the mark items you have defined. If you have defined more mark items than the actual legend marks, the redundant mark items will not be adopted. You can click , , or to remove a mark item, or to arrange the order of the these items.

     To change the style of a mark item, select it in the Mark Items box and then choose a new one from the Mark Items drop-down list.

     In the Icon box, specify the horizontal and vertical alignment styles, and the gap between each entry mark and entry label. You can also set the width and height for the legend entry marks.

     In the Border box, set the color, style, thickness and transparency properties of the icon border.

   • For a line chart, you can also check Use Node as Mark or Use Line and Node as Mark to apply the style and color of the line nodes or lines and line nodes automatically to the legend entry marks. When either of these two is checked, you can also specify the properties of icons in the Icon box.
8. In the Behaviors tab (this tab is only available to library components), select a trigger event from the drop-down list in the Events column, then click in the Actions column and click that appears in the text box to open the Web Action List dialog, where you can bind a web action to the legend which will be triggered when the specified event occurs on the legend.

   To add a web behavior line, click , and if a web behavior is not required, click to remove it.

   Click or to adjust the order of the behaviors. Then, when an event that has been bound with more than one action happens, the upper action will be triggered first.

   The web actions you can bind to the legend include Filter, Sort, Parameter, Property and SendMessage. For details about these web actions, refer to Applying web actions to a label.

9. When done, click OK to apply the settings and close the dialog.

See also the Format Legend dialog for page report, web report, or library component for detailed explanation about options in the dialog.