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

Creating a 3D column chart


Now that we know how to draw a cube in 3D, it's time to convert that cube into a bar and draw a 3D bar chart. To keep things simple, we'll start with just one set of data.

Getting ready

Start by creating a new Main class inside a new package. We'll start from a setup similar to the previous recipe. For now, we've left out the mesh definition and the camera setup, as these will differ:

package com.graphing.graph 
{
    import away3d.containers.View3D;
    import away3d.lights.DirectionalLight;
    import away3d.materials.lightpickers.StaticLightPicker;
    import com.graphing.Graph3D;
    import flash.display.Sprite;
    import flash.events.Event;
    public class Main extends Sprite 
    {
        private var _view:View3D;
        private var _data:Array = [[0,20],[50,70],[100,0],[150,150],[200,300],[250,200],[300,400],[350,20],[400,60],[450,250],[500,90],[550,400],[600,500],[650,450],[700,320]];
        public function Main():void 
        {
            _view = new...