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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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

How does drill-down work in FusionCharts?


As we had earlier discussed, the columns, bars, or pie wedges on any chart are called data plots of the chart, in FusionCharts parlance. For each such data plot, FusionCharts allows you to define a click event termed as a link. This link helps you define drill-down on the chart for each data plot, and can be configured to initiate various actions such as redirecting the browser window to another web page or invoking a JavaScript function present on the page. These actions are collectively termed as drill-down actions. We will soon see how to define these links and their corresponding actions.

In order to enable drill-down capabilities on your charts, you need to create two sets of charts—parent and descendant (or child) charts.

  • A parent chart is the aggregate chart that the user sees first. This chart contains aggregate data, which upon click leads to the child chart showing the breakdown of data. In the example that we will soon build for Harry...