Pattern Editor

• May 28, 2021
• 2 minutes to read

This topic describes the purpose of the Pattern Editor, provides a brief overview of its sections and explains how to use this editor to create a pattern at design time.

The Pattern Editor is used to simplify text customization of series point labels, axis labels and legend items. The editor contains many built-in predefined placeholders that can be used together with different format specifiers to create a pattern for date-time, numeric, currency and other data types.

The Pattern Editor can be invoked for the AxisLabel.TextPattern, SeriesLabel.TextPattern, Series.LegendTextPattern, CrosshairAxisLabelOptions.Pattern, XYSeries2D.CrosshairLabelPattern and CrosshairOptions.GroupHeaderPattern properties using the ellipsis button.

Note

The customization of legend items works when the XYSeries.ColorEach mode is enabled (the ColorEach is always enabled by default for Pie and Donut and Nested Donut charts).

To invoke the Pattern Editor, for example, for the Side-by-Side Bar series labels:

• invoke the Chart Designer;
• select the Series1 in the Chart Structure window;
• locate the SeriesLabel.TextPattern property in the designer Properties window;
• click the property ellipsis button as shown below.

Note

To show series labels in the chart, make sure the Series.LabelsVisibility property is set to true.

In the invoked Pattern Editor, you can see ‘Placeholders:’, ‘Pattern:’ and ‘Format:’ columns.

The table below lists Pattern Editor elements and explains their function.

Editor Element	Function
The ‘Placeholders:’ column	Contains a predefined set of placeholders, the number of which varies depending on the series type. You can see the full list of available placeholders in the corresponding section of the TextPattern properties.
The ‘Format’: column	Contains predefined DateTime, Number, Percent, Currency and Special formats.
The ‘Pattern:’ column	Displays a pattern created by the addition of items from the ‘Placeholders:’ and ‘Format:’ columns.
The ‘>’ button	Adds a selected placeholder from the ‘Placeholder’ column to the ‘Pattern:’ column.
The ‘>>’ button	Adds all available placeholders from the ‘Placeholder’ column to the ‘Pattern:’ column.
The Pattern preview	Displays the preview result of applying a pattern (the pattern is located in the ‘Pattern:’ column) to the chart element (series labels, axis labels or legend items).
The ‘OK’ button	Applies a pattern (if the pattern exists in the ‘Pattern’ column) to the corresponding text pattern property and closes the editor.
The ‘Cancel’ button	Cancels the operation of applying a pattern (if the pattern was not saved before using the ‘OK’ button) to the corresponding text pattern property and closes the editor.