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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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 — drilling down from the US map to the individual states


  1. 1. Create a folder called DrillDown under LearningFusionMaps, where we will store the HTML and XML files for both the parent US map and the 10 state maps it drills down to.

  2. 2. Make a copy of FirstMap.html and Data.xml under the DrillDown folder, and rename them as DrillDown.html and DrillDown.xml respectively.

  3. 3. Update the relative path of the FusionMaps JavaScript class and the US map in DrillDown.html using the following lines of code:

    <script language="JavaScript" src="../../FusionMaps/FusionMaps.js"></script>
    var map = new FusionMaps("../../FusionMaps/FCMap_USA.swf", "Map1Id", "750", "400", "0", "1");
    
  4. 4. Change the URL of the XML file in DrillDown.html to the new file as well, using the following line of code:

    map.setDataURL("DrillDown.xml");
    
  5. 5. Create an XML file Alabama.xml in the DrillDown folder with the following data:

    <map fillColor='F1F1F1' numberPrefix='$'>
    <colorRange>
    <color minValue...