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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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

Export charts directly to the server


We wanted to provide Harry with another method to share the exported charts—distributing a URL of the saved chart image. For this, we will utilize the ability of FusionCharts to send the exported chart directly to a server.

The process of exporting charts and saving them on the server involves setting up a server-side export component on your server. The client-side export component SWF and its associated JavaScript file are redundant for server-side export. The charts, after being rendered locally within a browser window, send the exported data to the server-side component, which in turn converts this data to image or PDF files. This file can be sent back to the browser for download or be saved on the server for later use.

Depending upon the supported technology of your server, you have four flavors of export component to choose from; PHP, ASP.NET, J2EE, and Ruby on Rails (RoR). The export components are located within the ExportHandlers folder inside...