Creating a Custom Chart for Product Unit Goals

In the previous two articles in the series, I showed how to create goals in terms of product units, and I also pointed out that there are no default goal management charts that can display them. What we need, with reference to the following figure of the goal management charts available by default, is a Goal Progress (Integer) chart:

This is another example of a fairly commonly encountered situation in CRM 2011: when a chart that can be rendered by the charting engine cannot be created by the chart designer. In this situation the solution’s always the same: export the chart as an XML file and edit it manually. And when I encounter it I’m never super-thrilled since although you can find some examples of achieving specific results by manually editing the XML, I still haven’t ever seen anything close to thorough documentation of how to create CRM charts in this way.

But fortunately, in this case it’s easy, by following these steps:

1. Navigate to the Goals data grid, and expand the Chart Pane.
2. Select the Goal Progress (Count) chart, and click the Charts tab on the ribbon.
3. Click Export Chart, as illustrated in the following figure:

   

4. Save the XML file with the default name, Goal Progress (Count).xml
5. Locate the file in the file system and rename it Goal Progress (Decimal).xml
6. Open it in your editor of choice. It should look like this:

7. Every place you see the text “integer”, change it to “decimal”. Your changed file should look like this:

8. Save and close the XML file, and then test it by importing it as a personal chart, by using the Import Chart button on the Charts ribbon.
9. To make it available to everybody, you can open the goal entity’s customization UI, navigate to charts, and using the Import Chart command from the More Actions menu.