Special kind of bar chart

Question

So, I have a kind of "customized bar chart" here. Forgive my lack of drawing skills, I just slapped this together in MS Paint.

enter image description here

The idea is that we have a patient who is on a certain medication. The chart has the following attributes:

Each black line represents a visit date (so, the horizontal axis is a date series).
The chart should have a unique indicator for start date, end date, and when the patient paused and resumed taking the medication.
Each visit date (black line) should have a dosage amount attached to it. This does not have to be a symbol, it can be a value (e.g., 2400mg, 4800, etc).

It's sort of a cross between a Gantt chart and a bar chart, but is neither of the two specifically. There are start and end dates, with a bar-like representation across a time period, but there could be potential gaps between pause and resume dates as well.

Is a chart like this even possible in BIRT, or does it require advanced customization?

Let me know if you need anything clarified.

Yes, we can even do a single medication per chart, as long as we can get it to look like that. — djmordigal

James Jenkins James Jenkins · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-02T14:37:22

What you should be able to do is build a table for each medication, where the columns are the doses, and dynamically change the width of the columns. Some quick research indicates adjusting the column width in a table can be challenging but here is question about doing it to a crosstab

The easiest way might be to leave the column widths floating, and add characters (same color as background so they don't display). The characters are added based on time between visits and will cause the column widths to change accordingly. You can use highlights to change the background code based on JavaScript.

Special kind of bar chart

2 Answers