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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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 — using FusionCharts.dll in a new Visual Studio project


  1. 1. Fire up Visual Studio, and create a blank ASP.NET (C#) website. Save the project as Harrys_Supermarket.

  2. 2. Right-click the project's name in Solution Explorer | Add New Item | Web Form. Rename it to ArrayExample.aspx for our first example that we will soon build.

  3. 3. Copy the Charts folder from the FusionCharts download package, and paste it in Solution Explorer.

  4. 4. Right-click the project's name in Solution Explorer and select Add Reference. In the window that pops up, click on the Browse tab, and navigate to the FusionCharts download package | Code | CS | bin | FusionCharts.dll. This will create a bin folder in Solution Explorer, and will have the FusionCharts.dll file in it.

What just happened

We just prepared this project to use FusionCharts.dll, and now we are ready to create our first chart. For our first chart, we will create a multi-series Column 3D chart to represent the Sales of Food Products versus Non-Food...