How to Create a Nightingale Rose Chart

What is a Nightingale Rose Chart

Nightingale Rose Charts are simple variations of the Radial Column Charts, in which there are no gaps left between the circular columns and each column appears as a rose petal.

Single-series charts have one single column set as Radial Column. Petals could all have the same or different colors. Multi-series charts have more than one column set as Radial Column, and each column usually gets the same different color.

Our multi-series Nightingale Rose charts are always stacked. Grouped series were possible, but they may introduce too much clutter and we decided to avoid them. Stacked petals can be normalized to 100%, for typical Full Stacked charts.

Steps to Create a Nightingale Rose Chart

Start Visual Xtractor or Data Xtractor. Connect to a database. Create or design a SQL query. Run the query and check the results.

1. Display and enable the Chart query builder.
2. Select your first numeric column as Radial Charts – Radial Column.
3. For multi-series charts, select other columns with the same chart type.
4. Switch to a Nightingale Rose chart with the Show bars with no gaps between button.
5. Select one optional column as chart Label.
6. Select one other optional column as chart Category, to have different petal colors.

Nightingale Rose Demo Query

This is a great alternative to learn about and play with this type of chart, if you don’t want to create it from scratch.

Look for the ready-to-use single-series MultiColor Nightingale Rose generated query under the Queries > Demo Queries > Charts > Circular Charts folder. Click on the “add demo queries” command link, if not already there.

The generated demo queries must work for any database, with no restriction. They use constant values generated on-the-fly and your database SQL engine, but do not depend on data from your tables, and never alter your database in any way.

Stacked Nightingale Rose Demo Query

Look for the ready-to-use multi-series Stacked Nightingale Rose generated query under the Queries > Demo Queries > Charts > Circular Charts folder. Click on the “add demo queries” command link, if not already there.

Click on the Use Full 100% toolbar button to show a Full Stacked Nightingale Rose chart.

Nightingale Rose Chart with Category

For single-series charts, you may select another column as chart Category, in which case the chart legend will be populated with category items. A multi-color Nightingale Rose with Category chart will show all petals of a category item with the same color. This makes it easy to select only those items to be displayed.

Look for the ready-to-use single-series Nightingale Rose with Category Chart generated demo query under the Queries > Demo Queries > Charts > Category Charts folder. Click on the “add demo queries” command link, if the demo query is not already there.

Nightingale Rose with Variable Size Pie

You may also emulate a single-series Nightingale Rose chart with a Variable Size Pie Chart.

Just change the Radial Column with Size, keep the Label selection as it is, but pass one constant value (let’s say 1) to a new Pie chart setting. This creates a Pie with slices having the same angle in the middle, but a variable height.

Show Size as data label values, and that’s also a Nightingale Rose indeed, made with a Pie:

Customize your Nightingale Rose Chart

The chart toolbar at the bottom has many options you may change with one single click, to alter the graph. Here is just an example of what you can further do with this type of chart:

1. Make it single-color, to use the same first palette color for all petals.
2. Change the drawing style (to Mist) or make the whole graph monochrome.
3. With one click, show only the chart’s graph, with no plot or labels.
4. Click on legend items to hide some petals.
5. Switch to a basic Radial Column chart, by adding gaps between petals.

Conclusion

• Creating Nightingale Rose charts in Data Xtractor or Visual Xtractor is fast, simple and trivial: set one or more numeric columns as Radial Column charts, one optional column as Label, and switch on a toolbar button to show no gaps between petals.
• Add a Category column to single-series charts, to filter all petals that belong to category items.
• Many builtin powerful features of these chart type are common to most other charts: filtering series through the legend items, interactivity, monochrome or grayscale colors etc.
• Switch to another builtin chart theme, or customize your own, for any possible color or other styles.