Define an Appearance for Painting All Visual Elements

Feb 01, 2021

This document describes the easiest way to change a chart’s overall look and feel - by choosing one from the built-in appearances.

In XtraCharts, numerous built-in appearance presets are available, that define the look of all the chart’s key elements - its diagram, axes, legend, series, and so on.

A chart’s appearance is determined by the ChartControl.AppearanceName property, and the list of its presets is returned by the ChartControl.GetAppearanceNames method.

The following images demonstrate a chart with two different appearances.

The property’s value	Resulting image
ChartControl.AppearanceName = Light
ChartControl.AppearanceName = Gray

When an appearance is defined, it’s often required to individually paint each series, or each point within a series (e.g. for a Bar series), and define a palette that is used to paint them. This is described in the next section of this document.

For a step-by-step tutorial, refer to How to: Customize a Chart’s Appearance.

Note

In addition, you can enable your end-users to specify palettes and appearance for a chart themselves. Refer to the Chart Ribbon and Toolbars help topic for more information.