Charts in Forest let you build visual data representations directly from your collections, without writing custom code. Use them to monitor KPIs, track trends, and create dashboards your operations team can act on.
Charts can be displayed in two places:
- The Dashboard tab, a shared dashboard visible to your team.
- The Analytics tab of a specific record, charts scoped to a single record’s data.
Chart types
Forest supports six chart types:
| Type | Description | Example |
|---|
| Single value | Displays one key metric as a large number | Total customers, MRR |
| Repartition | Pie or donut chart showing distribution across categories | Customers by country, Paid vs Free |
| Time-based | Line or bar chart showing a metric over time | Signups per month |
| Percentage | Displays a metric as a percentage | % paying customers |
| Objective | Progress bar showing actual vs target | Orders vs monthly goal |
| Leaderboard | Ranked list showing top N items | Companies by transaction volume |
For Repartition charts, only the top 5 categories are shown individually. All others are grouped into a 6th “Other” category.
Creating a chart
- Enable Layout Editor mode by clicking the toggle in the top navigation.
- Navigate to the Dashboard tab (or the Analytics tab of a record).
- Click Add a new chart.
- Enter a name and optional description.
- Select a chart type.
- Configure the chart data source (see below).
- Save and exit Layout Editor mode.
Simple mode (UI-based)
In Simple mode, configure your chart by selecting:
- Collection, which data source to query.
- Aggregate function,
count, sum, average, min, max.
- Group by field, the dimension to group results by.
- Time frame, for time-based charts: day, week, month, or year.
- Filters, optional conditions to restrict which records are included.
Query mode (SQL)
For advanced analytics, use Query mode to write custom SQL directly.
Query mode is only available for SQL databases. For security reasons, only SELECT queries are allowed.
| Chart type | Required columns |
|---|
| Single value | value |
| Single value with growth | value, previous |
| Repartition | key, value |
| Time-based | key, value |
| Objective | value, objective |
| Leaderboard | key, value (with LIMIT) |
SELECT COUNT(*) AS value
FROM customers;
SELECT status AS key, COUNT(*) AS value
FROM orders
GROUP BY status;
SELECT DATE_TRUNC('month', created_at) AS key, COUNT(*) AS value
FROM signups
GROUP BY key
ORDER BY key;
SELECT companies.name AS key, SUM(transactions.amount) AS value
FROM transactions
JOIN companies ON transactions.beneficiary_company_id = companies.id
GROUP BY key
ORDER BY value DESC
LIMIT 10;
Record-specific analytics
Charts can also be scoped to a single record. When placed in the Analytics tab of a collection:
- In Query mode, use
{{recordId}} to inject the current record’s ID into your SQL query.
- In API mode, the
record_id is automatically passed in the HTTP body.
Example:
SELECT DATE_TRUNC('month', transactions.created_at) AS key, SUM(transactions.amount) AS value
FROM transactions
WHERE transactions.company_id = {{recordId}}
GROUP BY key
ORDER BY key;
Managing charts
In Layout Editor mode:
- Move charts by dragging them on the dashboard.
- Resize charts to fit your layout.
- Edit a chart’s configuration by clicking the pencil icon.
- Delete a chart by clicking the trash icon.
