Bullet Chart

Originally posted on SAT, MARCH 10, 2007 AT 19:33

OK, so instead of rattling off acronyms and dropping references to other people's work and littering the place with questions, how 'bout we pony up?

Here's an analytic that I wrote last year for a proof of concept. It's based on the Bullet Chart introduced to me in Stephen Few's book Information Dashboard Design. Shortly after I saw a screenshot of a version of the chart written using SAS Graph over on Dashboard Spy


It's written in SVG and JavaScript and uses the SVG equivalent of XmlHttpRequest to load data from an external XML file. The XML file should be replace with a REST-style webservice implemented in PHP, JSP, etc. I relied heavily on Kevin Lindsey's tutorial on JavaScript and the SVG DOM while working on this. A nice feature is that the graph adjusts automatically to the number of data elements in the XML document. If I were to do it again, I might approach it more as an XSLT view in Spring. Any takers?


The project is pretty simple, redsquare-ajax.svg and a test data file metrics.xml. That's it, no runtime, enless you want to make the data dynamic. I would think for monthly metrics, a small XML file to upload is not too onerous.