Book Image

FusionCharts Beginner's Guide: The Official Guide for FusionCharts Suite

Book Image

FusionCharts Beginner's Guide: The Official Guide for FusionCharts Suite

Overview of this book

User experience can make or break any app these days, no matter whether it's a commercial product or an internal solution. While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite. Once you have mastered it, you can give your users a delightful reporting experience in no time at all. FusionCharts Beginner's Guide is a practical, step-by-step guide to using FusionCharts Suite for creating delightful web reports and dashboards. Getting you started quickly, you will learn advanced reporting capabilities like drill-down and JavaScript integration, and charting best practices to make the most out of it. Filled with examples, real-life tips and challenges, this book is the firstofitstype in the visualization industry. The book teaches you to create delightful reports and dashboards for your web applications assuming no previous knowledge of FusionCharts Suite. It gets your first chart up in 15 minutes after which you can play around with different chart types and customize them. You will also learn how to create a powerful reporting experience using drill-down and advanced JavaScript capabilities. You will also connect your charts to server-side scripts pulling data from databases. Finally you round up the experience learning reporting best practices including right chart type selection and practical usability tips. By the end of the book, you will have a solid foundation in FusionCharts Suite and data visualization itself. You will be able to give your users a delightful reporting experience, from developers to management alike.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
FusionCharts
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 3. JavaScript Capabilities

Harry has set up a quick weekly audit process for three departments in his SuperMart. Positive move indeed! But, what use is an audit if there is no report at the end of it all? Thus, on came the request to set up a page just for this.

It quickly dawned upon us that we would need to make the audit report more useful than if it were merely displaying a set of charts. We will add functionalities to the page that will make his report viewing experience more comprehensive during daily use. "More comprehensive" means ensuring the charts load really fast, be seamlessly printed, and have the ability to easily copy the data to spreadsheets.

For adding these functionalities we will make use of JavaScript capabilities of FusionCharts.

In this chapter, we shall:

  • Access charts using JavaScript

  • Learn how to use JavaScript events raised by the charts

  • Dynamically update a chart's data without reloading the page or the chart

  • Retrieve data from a chart in XML, JSON, and CSV formats...