"Access Administration Interface" controls whether users can access the backend of Plotalot. By default, only Super Users have access, but you can grant access to other user groups if you wish.
Regardless of the "Access Administration Interface" setting, only Super Users can save changes to the Plotalot CSS file, import charts, or edit or save DatabasesOptions
There is an option to hide the Plotalot component sub-menu. Depending on the size of your screen and whether you have the main menu expanded or collapsed, you might prefer to hide the sub-menu.
In Joomla 4 and 5 this reduces the font sizes and spacing to fit more information on the admin pages, which is a useful improvement on small laptops.
The background colour for the chart area of the chart editor. You will only see this colour behind a chart with a transparent background. You might want to set it the same as the background colour of your website, so that you can get a better idea of how charts will look on your site. The default setting is 'transparent'.
Defaults to On, which means that Plotalot only allows SQL queries that start with SELECT or (SELECT. With this setting you can be confident that Plotalot cannot make any changes to your data. If you switch this option off, you can use any valid SQL query, including queries that update data.
Defaults to Off, which means that plots can only use a single query. If you enable this option you can use multiple queries, separated by semi-colons. When a plot query uses multiple queries, all except the last query are merely executed. The result set for the chart is obtained from the last query. For example you might want to call a stored procedure before generating your chart values:
CALL `my-procedure`; SELECT `col1`, `col2` FROM `my-table`;Defaults to On, which means that when Plotalot finds nulls in your sql results, it changes them to a zero (0) for numeric columns, and an empty string ('') for text columns. It also issues a warning in the chart editor. No warning is issued when such a chart is drawn on the front end.
If you want null values to be included in your chart data as actual null values, you can set this option to "No". You might want to do this if you plan to use the Google Charts InterpolateNulls option to guess the value of missing data points, or if you want to see actual gaps in your charts.
If neither of these options is right for you, your query can make use of the SQL IFNULL( ) function to return a specific value in place of a null value.
If you need features of the Google Charts API that have not yet been released, you can set this option to "On". This should not be used on live sites. You can read more about the Google Charts API release process here:
https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/release_notes#ReleaseProcess
If a non-zero value is specified here, the specified Google Charts API is used, overriding the "Experimental API" option.
At the time of writing, the current version of the Google Charts API is 50, and it is causing problems on some sites. If your charts show the error "b.split is not a function" or "Cannot read property 'offset' of undefined", please set this option to 49 to load the previous version of the API.
To revert to using the "current" version of the API, set this option to 0 (zero).
If you no longer need to see the sample charts in the chart list, use this option to hide them.
Normally when you click on a chart to edit it, the editor opens with the chart shown. If you have charts with SQL that takes a long time to run, you can switch this option off. Charts are then only shown when you use the Save button.
For many purposes you can control dates and numeric formats yourself using the features of Plotalot, but in some cases you may need to specify the Locale used by the Google Charts API, as described here:
https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/basic_load_libs#loadwithlocale
The Locale affects the formatting of values such as currencies, dates, and numbers.
The setting here in the Plotalot Component Options sets the default locale used for all Google charts on the site. You can also set a specific locale for each chart or Google table, which overrides this global setting.