A user reported an odd problem today. She was using Soundings, my ColdFusion survey application, and noticed something odd. She would do a report and the chart would be missing data! Here is an example:

This chart should have 9 items, even though some are blank, but we only see 5 labels. I did a quick google check and found out this was a known bug:

http://cfchart.blogspot.com/2005/06/charting-technote-addendum.html

Turns out that in earlier versions of CF, the labels were rotated, but a designer (darn designers!) decided that horizontal labels made more sense. I agree - but it would be nice if CF would automatically rotate them instead of just dropped them.

So I decided to make a quick XML file. From the URL above I saw that I needed to use this XML:

I didn't want to modify the core style files since that wouldn't be a solution for Soundings. According to the docs, you can use either an XML file or a string to specify style information. However, now matter what I did I couldn't get it to work. So I switched to an XML file using just the code above. This still didn't work. However, now I figured it was because I wasn't specifying a "full" style.

Now I was worried. I really did not want to specify 100 styles just to tweak one small little thing. I loaded up the WebCharts style editor. (Everyone knows about that, right? More info can be found here.) First - while this is a cool tool, I had trouble finding a "simple" bar chart. I made my best guess and took a look the XML. Turns out - the file was very simple. Even better, I was able to figure out why my XML above was missing. I changed it to this:

And that alone was enough to fix the problem. Here is the chart as it appears now:

As you can see, I lost the black borders and text, but to be honest it doesn't really bug me much.