Book Image

ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

Book Image

ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

Overview of this book

"A picture is worth a thousand words" has never been more true than when representing large sets of data. Bar charts, heat maps, cartograms, and many more have become important tools in applications and presentations to quickly give insight into complicated issues.The "ActionScript Graphing Cookbook" shows you how to add your own charts to any ActionScript program. The recipes give step-by-step instructions on how to process the input data, how to create various types of charts and how to make them interactive for even more user engagement.Starting with basic ActionScript knowledge, you will learn how to develop many different types of charts.First learn how to import your data, from Excel, web services and more. Next process the data and make it ready for graphical display. Pick one of the many graph options available as the book guides you through ActionScript's drawing functions. And when you're ready for it, branch out into 3D display.The recipes in the "ActionScript Graphing Cookbook" will gradually introduce you into the world of visualization.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
ActionScript Graphing Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Loading a data file from the Internet


This recipe looks at using the URLLoader class to load a CSV data file from the Internet. It's very similar to the previous recipe, but it gives you the ability to dynamically load files from the Internet. Thus you can update the files without needing to change the ActionScript program.

Getting ready

Make sure you have a copy of the data.csv file somewhere on the Internet. If you don't have a site, you can use DropBox as described in the first recipe of this chapter. This recipe will use a link to my own DropBox folder, but it's much more instructive if you can use your own and change the data to see the effect.

Start by creating a copy of the previous Recipe1 class and name it Recipe2. This will be our basis.

How to do it...

In the following steps, we'll replace the embed code with code that will load the file from the Internet:

  1. Remove the embed code and the DataClass property. We won't need these anymore.

  2. Now move the parsing and function drawing code into...