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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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

LinkedCharts for simplified drill-downs


In our earlier example, we had to create one web page for each descendant chart. This could mean that if you have dozens of data points in your parent chart, you will need to create dozens of HTML pages, each to contain a descendant chart. This could get murky and unmanageable.

In an effort to curtail this, FusionCharts has a nifty feature called LinkedCharts. Using LinkedCharts, you can do one of the following:

  1. 1. Reduce the number of web pages to just one by curtailing the creation of all web pages that contain descendant charts. This web page contains the parent chart and loads the descendant charts in this page itself, as and when required. However, the number of XML files in this case remains the same, one for the parent chart, and one for each descendant chart.

  2. 2. Or, you can even go further and curtail all the XML files of descendant charts. In this case, all the data is contained in the XML of the parent chart.

Let us consider an example for both...