Chart Colors

[LMHoffman]

Hi all, am a new system administrator and heard the community is a great place to get it

I'm trying to define chart colors for some SLA reports and can't seem to get the colors to change. I've gone to Reports>Administration>Chart Colors and created entries for both the task_sla table and the incident_sla table using the element SLA and setting the value to the sla name that we've defined, then selecting the Color name (have added our colors to Color Definition).

Can't figure out where I'm going wrong and would appreciate any help.

Report info:

Rendered report - want to change the colors from these default colors to our company colors if possible:

[tltoulson · Accepted solution]

Hi Leah,

Welcome to the wild world of ServiceNow!   You are encountering a pretty common issue.   The SLA field you are grouping by is a Reference Field which behaves a bit different.   Reference fields have a value and a display value.   The display value is what you see as the administrator, SLA Class B for example.   ServiceNow doesn't understand the display value though, it only understands the value which for reference fields is the sys_id, a unique identifier for every record.

So that is the background, to fix it, we need to change the value you are putting in the Chart Color form's value field from the display value to the value.   Heres what you need to do:

1.   Navigate to the list of SLA Definitions

2.   Right click on the row of one of your definitions

3.   In the context menu, click Copy sys_id

4.   Copy the sys_id in the pop up and close the pop up

5.   Navigate to the Chart Color record for the SLA Item you just copied

7.   Paste the sys_id into the Chart Color value field

8.   Repeat this for each of the SLA's

You may need to reset server cache and/or browser cache to see the effects, I can't remember if its necessary or not.   If you don't see the effects when you run the report, type cache.do into the navigation filter and clear your browser cache.

Let me know if any of this doesn't make any sense

[LMHoffman]

Thank you so much - that did the trick!!

Another question - so the value displays in the list as the sys_id. Is there a way to show the display value so when someone is looking at the list they can see the sys_id and have another column that says that's SLA Class A?

[tltoulson]

Hi Leah,

I am assuming that you are wondering about the Chart Color's Value field and whether or not it can display the Display Value.   Sadly, no.   The Value field is a text field, so the Value and Display Value are the same.   Your best option would be to customize the form and add an additional field where you could put the Display Value separately.   It wouldn't actually do anything, it would just be a simple text field where you could record the human readable version.

[LMHoffman]

Oh, and another question -

When I pull a bar chart without assigning colors to specific values, the system presents the chart with default colors. Is there a way to set the default colors to our company colors and have the system use those instead rather than me assigning a color?

So when the system uses default colors, it looks like it runs through each color then starts over as needed, so in the below shot, it starts with the corn blue, goes through it's color palette then goes back to corn blue.   Would like to do the same but use our company colors instead.

How we'd like report to render - note start with our dark blue, goes through our color palette, then uses dark blue again

Appreciate any assistance!