APEX 4 (bug) - Series Type (Bar, Line, Marker) and Multiple Series

A new feature in APEX 4.0 is that you can define per series what you want the series type (Bar, Line or Marker).

Lets start with an example.

We create a 3D Column chart based on the salary of the employees.

Our first Series looks like this (the Series Type is per default Bar):

select null as link, ename, sal

from emp

Now to add a second series you have two choices, either you add another value to the existing series or you create a new series. We will go with the first option, so our query becomes:

select null as link, ename, sal, nvl(comm,0) as comm

from emp

If you run the chart you see for both salary as commission a bar (column)

Now we want to add a line with the average of the salary, so we add another series with as sql query:

select null as link, ename, avg(sal) over() as avg_sal

from emp

The Chart Series look like this

Make sure you select Line as Series Type for Series 2 (the average salary)

When you run the chart you expect to see the same chart as above but with a line that represents the average of the salary...

As you can see that is not really what happened. It seems there is a bug in APEX 4.0.2.00.07 (and probably before) with defining multiple series in the same query.

What happened is that the first value, salary, is still a bar, but the second value, commission, changed from bar to line and the third value, average salary, became a bar (that is because our main chart type is a 3D Column chart, so it takes whatever is default). So APEX doesn't take the Series type into account correctly.

The workarounds is to not use the single query with multiple values, but a single query per series.

Running the chart again shows us what we expected

(Found in APEX 4.0.2.00.07)