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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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

A word on how the export process works


The charts can be exported in three different formats, JPEG image, PNG image, and PDF document. Furthermore, the charts can either be exported locally at client-side or be sent to a server to be processed, or saved there. Upon initiation of the export process, the chart captures its own image in bitmap format. This bitmap image is passed on to an export component for further processing.

When exporting at client-side, the charts need to be assisted by an export component SWF to process and save the file. Charts exported at client-side add no additional load on the server. This is extremely beneficial when there are too many people exporting charts at the same time.

On the other hand, for server-side export, the exported image from the chart is processed by a server-side export component script. With this feature, the charts can be processed by the server or be saved as an image on the server for later use or for archival purposes.