Charts & Visuals

Scape gives you two ways to turn table data into a chart, both built with the same point-and-click encoding:

The Visual view — a chart view of a single table, right alongside its Table, Kanban, Gantt, and List views.
A standalone Chart — a first-class object (like a note or a table) that can chart any table and be embedded in notes.

Both let you pick a mark — bar, line, area, scatter, pie, or KPI — and assign fields to encoding shelves. Which one you want depends on whether the chart belongs to a table or stands on its own.

The Visual view

Every table has a view switcher (Table / Kanban / Gantt / List). Click + Visual to add a chart view of that table. Its data source is locked to the current table — it's shown as a chip, not a picker — so a Visual view always charts the table it lives in.

The view has three parts:

Fields rail (left) — the table's columns split into Dimensions (things to group by — text, select, date, bool) and Measures (numbers). Click a field to assign it.
Spec card — an editable chart title, a mark switcher (bar / line / area / scatter / pie / KPI), and a format gear with stacking (none / stacked / 100%), value labels, legend, and donut toggles.
Chart — the live render below the card.

Encoding shelves

You build the chart by filling shelves on the spec card:

Shelf	What goes here
X	A dimension to group by (or a numeric measure, for scatter).
Y	One or more measures, each with an aggregate — Count, Sum, Avg, Min, Max — or Count of rows.
Color	A dimension to split the series by. (Hidden when Y has two or more measures.)
Size	Scatter only — a measure that scales point size.

Edits autosave to the view. To create or configure a Visual view from an agent, use create_data_store_view / update_data_store_view with view_type: "visual".

Standalone Charts

A Chart is a first-class, reusable object — saved in the project, editable, and embeddable — but it currently has no sidebar entry (that tree is deferred). You create one with the editor's /chart slash command, or with the create_chart MCP tool, and you open its builder from a note that embeds it (see below). Unlike the Visual view, a standalone chart is not bound to one table: it has a free data-source picker, so you can chart any table in the project.

In the builder you:

Pick the data source table.
Drag fields from the rail onto the X / Y / Color / Size shelves (the Visual view uses click-to-assign; the standalone builder uses drag-and-drop).
Choose a mark and formatting, exactly as in the Visual view.

A chart runs a real query against its source rather than aggregating a loaded window like the Visual view — but that query has its own row limit (100 by default), so a chart shows the first N rows/groups unless the limit is raised in its spec (adjustable via MCP).

Embedding charts in notes

A standalone chart can be embedded in a note, where it renders inline. Use the embed's Open button to open its builder. The note stores only the chart's id (plus a cached title and height), so editing the chart's definition updates every embed — each note picks up the change the next time it's opened (there's no live refresh when the underlying data changes).

The builder's Linked notes panel shows which notes embed a chart. If you delete a chart, any note that embedded it keeps the cell as an inert placeholder rather than breaking.

MCP tools

Agents have full parity with the standalone builder:

Tool	Description
`list_chart`	List charts in one or all projects — id, title, project, and mark.
`get_chart`	Read a chart's full `VisualSpec` (query + encoding).
`create_chart`	Create an empty chart; configure it with `update_chart`.
`update_chart`	Replace a chart's spec and/or title.
`run_chart`	Execute the chart's query and return rows, columns, and encoding.
`delete_chart`	Permanently delete a chart.
`list_chart_backlinks`	List the notes that embed a chart (the "Linked notes" panel).
`embed_chart_in_note`	Embed an existing chart into a note (same-project only).
`embed_chart_from_spec`	One-shot: create a chart from a full spec and embed it in a note.

For the table-scoped Visual view, use create_data_store_view / update_data_store_view with view_type: "visual" instead — see Tables.