An alternative to the ChartPart in SharePoint 2010…and it’s Free!

Many people saw the demoes and loved the new out-of-the-box charting capabilities with SharePoint 2010. However, many of those same people were saddened when they realized it was only included in the Enterprise edition. After looking around on Codeplex and testing various 2007 charting solutions, I stumbled across one I really liked…and it worked! I have yet to find any issues with this being built for the previous version but running in the new version of SharePoint. Please post your issues in the comments if you do find some.

Because I know you can’t wait, let’s show the end result and then walk through the steps performed to get this running.

Requirement: Silverlight installed on the client machine

Download SmartTools Chart from Codeplex (filename: SmartTools.ChartsSetup_v1_0_BETA2.zip)

When you unzip the download and run the Setup executable it will fail because it cannot find WSS 3.0 (since this is 2010)

So, instead of using the installer, you need to install the solution manually. Look at the bright side; more practice with PowerShell!

Open the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and follow below:

Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath <path to wsp file>
Install-SPSolution -Identity <filename of wsp file> -GACDeployment -WebApplication <web app URL>

Go to the desired Site Collection within the Web Application of which the solution was deployed to and activate the feature

The solution adds six web parts:

Pick the List Chart web part and add it to the page, notice that that web part says List not found

Locate the web part properties and type in the name of the List. The Label Field is the X axis and Value Field the Y axis. Leave View blank for the All Items view. If you want to use a custom view, type the name of the view (ex. All Items for AllItems.aspx)

Click Ok on the properties and you should see your chart display. Notice that you can move your mouse over a bar to see its value.

After adding the Tasks, Task per Status, and Tasks per User web parts, you end up with something like.…..

You can even click on a pie slice to break it out:

Pretty nice for the price….and no, I did not intend for that to rhyme.