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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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

FusionCharts and server-side scripts


If you recall from Chapter 1, Introducing FusionCharts, building a chart involved three steps:

  1. 1. Set up FusionCharts for the entire application, typically done only once per application.

  2. 2. Encode the data for the chart, either in XML or JSON format.

  3. 3. Write the HTML and JavaScript code to include the chart in a web page.

Setting FusionCharts for your dynamic web application

Setting up FusionCharts for your server-side application is very similar to what we have discussed in Chapter 1, Introducing FusionCharts. The easiest way is to create a globally accessible folder called Charts or FusionCharts in the root of your web application, and then copy all the SWF and JavaScript files from the /Charts folder of the FusionCharts download package to this folder.

Embedding FusionCharts in a web page without using JavaScript

Before we get to the data encoding part, let's review the last step, that is, embedding the chart in a page. You can still use the following...