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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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

Time for action — getting ready to build dynamic charts


  1. 1. Ensure that you have a ready application in PHP, ASP.NET, or JSP in which you want to use FusionCharts. For the sake of brevity, we will not cover how to create or set up a new application. You can use your choice of IDE for the application creation and coding.

  2. 2. Create a new database (recommended) or use an existing database, which we will use to create dynamic charts. Next, download harrys_supermarket.sql which is present in the downloads of this book and execute the SQL scripts contained in this file against your database. This script creates just one table orders, having four columns, namely, order_id, cust_id, order_date, and order_amount, as shown in the following table:

    order_id

    cust_id

    order_date

    order_amount

    476

    692

    2010-06-15

    1134

    789

    991

    2011-05-24

    5999

    1134

    1250

    2011-09-30

    499

    ....

    ....

    ....

    ....

    The SQL script also populates the table with dummy data. We will use this table...