In this post I will summarize what has been done so far. Work on back end is finished and decision made on what charts to draw. Initially the idea was to only draw one chart, but as things progressed I came up with three more charts, so there will be 4 charts in total:
- Chart to show monthly amount of pallets transferred by suppliers.
- Chart to show total pallets transferred IN and OUT.
- Chart to show total pallets transferred by transfer type.
- Chart to show monthly transfers by transfer type.
I made a sample for each chart using Microsoft excel and I will discus each chart individually.
Chart to show monthly amount of pallets transferred by suppliers
This chart was and still is the basis of this project. However I’m concerned that the share size of this chart might cause problems drawing it: for example a half a year period with 40 different supplier names would mean that 240 bars would need to be drawn on the chart. I have never drawn a chart this big and just hope it wont crash once being rendered at front end. An example of this chart is demonstrated below.
All data for this chart have been collected and organized at back end and sent to front end in a structured manner for the chart to be rendered.
Chart to show total pallets transferred IN and OUT
This chart will show two bar charts for the selected time period. One will be a sum of all negative transfers (pallets that were transferred out, returned, admin out) and another will be a sum of all positive transfers (pallets that were transferred in, admin in). An example of this chart is below.
All data for this chart have been collected and organized at back end and sent to front end in a structured manner for the chart to be drawn.
Chart to show total pallets transferred by transfer type
As there are 8 transfer types, this chart will show a total pallet quantities for each transfer for the selected time period.
All data for this chart have been collected and organized at back end and sent to front end in a structured manner for the chart to be drawn.
Chart to show monthly transfers by transfer type
This chart will demonstrate pallet transfers by transfer type on a monthly basis. As there are 8 transfer types, there will be 8 chart bars for each month.
All data for this chart have been collected and organized at back end and sent to front end in a structured manner for the chart to be drawn.
Pros and cons of this project so far
I consider this project to be at it’s mid point and from now my main focus will be front end. Things I could have done better are:
- Spend more time on CHEP website to have a better understanding of how the excel transaction report gets generated. Because I didn’t do that at the beginning I was working with an incomplete data set.
- If I have spent a bit more time investigating the data, I could have come up with all the chart ideas before I started coding. Because of that there were a few occasions when I had to discard the code I have already written due to the change of plans.
- At the begging of this blog I used Microsoft paint to draw chart examples, and only later I realised that it is a much better idea to use Microsoft Excel (that should have been a no brainer..).
- Blogging is time consumig: I feel that if I wasn’t writing blog posts I could have already finnished this project 🙂
Now lets make a list of things that are good about this project:
- I’m becoming familiar with using WordPress.
- I started using Microsoft excel to create chart examples and I’m getting better at it.
- Added a new menu item to my personal website for Excel where I will later showcase my excel spreadsheets. So this is a big bonus.
- Wrote a lot of blog posts, and this way I’m adding content to my WordPress website.
- Used SQL GROUP BY and IN statements for the first time, as in my previous projects I didn’t use them, so some new experienced gained here as well.
I have uploaded the spreadsheet with chart examples. It can be accessed by clicking this link:
https://machinecandream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/chartExamplesFinished.xlsx
One more thing that will need to be done at the end of this project is writing a user guide, that will show how to download excel file with correct data from CHEP website. That’s it for now, hopefully I will have some time to start working on front end, though I’ve been busy with everyday life tasks recently so it is not guaranteed.