Ask Gary: Advanced Charting

I got an email from a reader yesterday asking about CFCHART and my JFREE custom tags:

Hi - i noticed your blog entry from earlier this year about work you were doing on a CF custom tag interface to JFREE, and was wondering how that work was coming along. I'm looking at try to do charting beyond what CFCHART is capable of, and this looked like a nice alternative. thanks!

While I would love to say that my Chart custom tags are better than that of CFCHART that would be a lie. The fact is I built the custom tags more as an experiment and hoped that it my prove useful to someone, the tags are in no way mature enough to be competition to CFCHART.

A lot of people seem to forget that there is a pretty powerful charting engine under the hood of the CFCHART tag. Using only what CFCHART it self provides I would definitely understand that you would quickly bump up against it's limitations.

WebCharts3D

Webcharts3D is the company that made the charting engine that CF uses. There is also a chart designer located in <CFInstallDir>/Charting/webcharts.bat Double click on the bat file and start up the web designer. With the designer you can manipulate all the attributes and properties of the chart style you want and save the XML style file.

Once you have your style file you can use some custom tags provided by WebCharts3D to use your chart style.

Happy Coding...