I'd love for Ops Dashboard to have the ability to re-order categories in Serial Charts?
Currently, we're able to sort categories. But, unable to categorise them manually.
Thanks,
Gee
Bumping this and saying this is a need - to be able to sort serial charts by a custom category order.
That this has not been fixed in 6 years is frankly unacceptable. I say fixed because the dashboard product is essentially broken without manual sorting. It never should have been released without this most basic and logical of a feature. It isn't a nice to have, its a fundamental flaw in the product. Fix it ESRI!!!
Totally agree; this also means more effort for the viewer to interpret what the chart is showing and this makes the creator look bad too!
Gave it another thumbs up. Can't believe this isn't an option
Just keeping this request alive. It’s now 23-06-2025, and this was originally submitted back on 10-06-2019 — with 98 upvotes — and the status is still 'Under Consideration'.
We can't effectively use the charts as they are, since there's no way to sort the data in a logical order. We're using string values for twelve categories that don’t follow alphabetical order.
Trying to prefix them with numbers (e.g., 1, 2, 3...) only works up to 10, after which the sorting becomes 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3, etc., which defeats the purpose.
I can't imagine why anyone would need this functionality. Everyone is just being ridiculous, charts that are not logical and generally confusing to your audience, are the wave of the future.
Let's hope this is still being looked at as a possibility, seems such a easy win for ESRI. Sorting based on a field/alphabetically doesn't always work - as most of the examples on this post show. I'm in a similar boat and would love to be able to custom sort the categories!
How is this request 4 years old and only "Under Consideration"? It seems like such a basic request. My current use case that brought me to this request is a 133 question long survey, where half of the questions are Likert scale type questions. So without going in and manually changing the data formatting of 60 different questions, I have 60 charts with the same dumb looking layout of answers.
This is an issue with charts across all ArcGIS products really. I debated trying to build the results dashboard for this survey in Experience Builder, thinking "oh this is the newest product, I might be able to manually order things there." Nope.
It looks like this has gone into a black hole. I hope no one's holding their breath.
Adding to the requests for implementation. In a chart using Grouped Features, sorting by descending count is extremely common.
@patrickb This has been "Under Consideration" for over 2 and a half years!!! Any update on this? Users desperately need this basic functionality.
I would also like to see this implemented...
A method to sort manually is needed. How silly is this:
@ESRI Is there any update on this? It is really necessary to be able to sort categories in a logical way which may not just be ascending or descending.
Have to add on that I can't comprehend that there is no standard way to organize chart in a logical order. Right now you can just make a chart that confuses people and/or makes no sense. Or you have to add fields and workarounds.
I just don't understand why making charts that make sense isn't a standard feature. The standard feature is making charts that DO NOT make sense. That is weird.
@DanteLee, you're my savior! This should be an easy thing to do in the UI, but I'm glad I found this workaround.
Adding comment and use case to help emphasize the importance of a sort option. We generate a new dashboard twice daily to accompany our vehicle fleet schedules. The serial chart is a stacked bar chart that summarizes the total quantity of each product type required to load by hour. This helps our staff at the domicile ensure the product is ready when the next vehicle arrives for pickup. We would like to sort the stacked bars by product name, but our naming convention limits using ascending or descending sorts.
We are facing the same issue daily. It makes the Grouped Values option in Serial Chart almost useless. Unless we bring in 100% cleaned-up data (and for some it doesn´t work anyway as commenters above already stressed) the is no way to correctly re-order the stacked categories in the serial chart. I would consider this to be a critical addition to the Operations Dashboards.
Indeed, coding isn't for everybody. I would strongly emphasize to add this feature.
In the DIY GeoApps mooc students use a survey with a likert like:
strongly disagree - disagree - neutral - agree - strongly agree
but currently there is no way of telling how the resulting series in the dashboard will be ordered.
Wow. Great prompt by DanteLee. That inspired me to attempt JSON editing for a different case. Each feature (habitat project) can have multiple values for ecological type. To keep the feature class simple, and flat, we simply have a field for each type, and insert a 1 into the field if the feature has that ecological type. Then, we can count the number of instances of each type to see the overall representation of ecological types across all projects. So there isn't anything in the data to sort by. BUT, I was able to go into the JSON and simply change the order in which the sums for each field are presented. For instance:
Here is a snippet of the original JSON:
...{"onStatisticField": "Island","outStatisticFieldName": "Island","statisticType": "sum"},{"onStatisticField": "InlandPlant","outStatisticFieldName": "InlandPlant","statisticType": "sum"},...
I simply changed that code to:
{"onStatisticField": "InlandPlant","outStatisticFieldName": "InlandPlant","statisticType": "sum"},{"onStatisticField": "Island","outStatisticFieldName": "Island","statisticType": "sum"},
Very easy and quick.
As a workaround, I was able to manipulate this in the JSON through AGO Assistant (https://ago-assistant.esri.com). I know digging into code isn't for everyone, but in case you're bold enough 😉
Hi, just to add to the weight of requests on this enhancement.
The ability to manually sort categories, and the order of stacking in a stacked chart is so essential to my particular use-cases that the Serial chart widget is almost useless without it.
I understand that the category sorting can be overcome by some careful data preparation beforehand, which is OK but not ideal, but I've never found a way to cause the stack order to be anything other than random. As far as I can tell there's nothing to change in the underlying json in the AGOL Assistant that deals with this, and the seeming randomness of the stack order is enormously frustrating.
E.g. if I create two comparison stacked charts that are different categories but split by the same field (say counts of animal types split by species for Year 1 and Year2), the fact that the stacking order of the species is random and usually different across the charts renders any visual comparison meaningless - and the whole purpose of the chart widget is as a visual aid (I think?).
Anyway, the move to 'Under consideration' is promising - I hope that the stacking issue is part of the roadmap.
And, just as an afterthought, does anyone have any idea what does control the stacking order?
Same to add emphasis/need to this issue. I need to show day of week and then the value of time, would be helpful if in a sensible order...
I have a similar issue. I don't control the data schema. I have six possible values for project status. Users need the order of the bars to display in a logical, chronological order: Not Planned, Plan, Design, Construction, etc. Sorting them alphabetically doesn't help. Being able to move the order of the bars manually, like you can with classes in a layer symbol visualization, even in a web map, would be ideal.
I should apologize for this post. The sorting I did above only mildly fixed my problem. In my case its supposed to be ordered green, yellow, orange, red, and at lease with the sorting I described above, the green is now on the bottom, but the other colors are not ordered correctly. Katie, the sorting I did was out of the box and is on the Data tab of the Serial Chart Configure options. I added another sort field and used "Statistic" to sort it secondarily.
Hi Mike - how did you add the sort option? Assume can't be done out of the box?
We have the same issue and it's a real frustration - it usually means having to go back and change the source data to include A/B/C or 1/2/3 as a prefix to each entry, so that the categories are sorted correctly. One example is months in text format (not date fields) - March 2020, April 2020, May 2020 will only order itself as April 2020, March 2020, May 2020, unless we put a prefix in the data before uploading it for the dashboard. If we were able to manually sort the order via drag and drop or similar, it would make things much more straightforward.
I’m having the same issue...age groups are being machine sorted.... as an example age 4-5 is graphed right next to age group 45-46 ..open to suggestions
Expanding on Sarah's reply. I found a way to sort my series data. My first bar chart:
2nd bar chart:
I added another sort feature (and also the only option they gave me for a second sort feature). Now, my categories are already in a good numerical order (0 lowest - 5 highest) so it worked out.
Unfortunately, sorting in charts is not always an option. As shown below, when your categories are from a date field (which does sort appropriately), and the data is split by a field, sorting the series is not an option.
And unfortunately, the order seems to be random. For example, the following two images are the same chart with the fiscal year filtered based on a category selector applied to the page. For one fiscal year, they're sorted one way, with the Total Intake being at the top of the stacked bars (preferred and intuitive ordering), but for another fiscal year, the Owner Surrendered number (which is a separate field and a portion of the Total Intake) is shown at the top of the stacked bars. Being able to sort the series manually or in some logical order would prevent misleading information in the dashboards.
Series sorted appropriately for one fiscal year selected:
Order of series changed in same chart with different fiscal year selected
By sorting ascending as shown in my screenshot, I get bars showing High, Low, Medium or I can switch to a descending sort for Medium, Low, High but neither of those orders is as desirable as the more reasonable order of Low, Medium, High which isn't possible with a text sort.
The data is coming from another business system that my team doesn’t control so editing the schema is not an option.
Status are: High, Medium, Low, however in the dashboard we see
Sign in to post, follow content, and more. New here? Register for free.
