More charting power in CFMX 7 than you may have thought (old news to some, new to others)
Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.Did you know there's a nifty Chart Designer built into CFMX 7? While Webcharts has sat under CFMX's charting since 6.0, this designer tool is newly available in CF7 only, as the webcharts.bat file in the cfusionmx7/charting subdirectory. It allows you to create still more useful and attractive charts than are built into CFCHART, and then you can leverage them using CFCHART. For those who've followed CF7 closely, this is old news, but for those who are still getting up to speed in CF7, it may be quite newsworthy.
I'd like to point you below to a few references to learn more. First, here's a screenshot of what the tool looks like:
And here are some of the resources to help guide you, from blog entries to articles to the docs to podcasts. I'd also like to thank Dale Fraser of the CFAussie mailing list whose note today first clued me into this stuff. Enjoy:
- Steve Brownlee's: Customizing Your CFCHART Results, from 12/05, which shows how to use the designer tool and how to connect to data in your app using CFCHART
- Chris Wiggington's "ColdFusion Tip: Using the included webcharts3d engine in CFMX 7", from 11/05. He focuses on calling it using Java and building the XML for the chart
- Tim Buntel's CFDJ article, "Not Your Father's Charting" by Tim Buntel in CFDJ
- The CFMX 7 docs on CFCHART and leveraging this feature
- The ColdFusion Weekly Podcast of April 3
- Apologies to anyone else who had a useful controbution on this subject. Let me know in a comment and I'll add you here.
Note as well that there is a pdf in that charting directory, a 35 page Designer User's Guide. And pay special attention to the available options in the designer under file>setup, in particular the 2 tabs, designer and server.
There is a more complete (125 page) WebChart Developer's Guide.
Finally, some other useful CF charting tips are available in a blog that was devoted to the subject, http://cfchart.blogspot.com/ . Though he only made entries June and July 2005, it's worth a look.
For more content like this from Charlie Arehart:Need more help with problems?
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I also wrote a 2nd article on how to create a Gantt Chart using the latest WebChart gallery
http://www.intersuit...
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Regards,
Chris
Pointless to recommend that to anyone...
The online guide as their website is the laziest excuse for help I've ever seen. It would be disgraceful for a "free" product which is not even the case here.
You're giving me grief for a 5 year old blog entry, telling me its subject was "pointless to recommend". Um, you think I wouldn't find that fairly offensive?
You're complaining about "not finding any tutorial at all", when in fact I list several in the entry.
You refer to the UI for the charts as being "coded with an axe". It sounds instead like *you* have some axe to grind. Please take it elsewhere. I really don't want to hear any more of your diatribe here. If you do, I will delete it. You've made your point here, if for some reason you would want to give people using the webcharts-based charting in CF a reason to think twice. I don't agree, but I haven't used the feature myself since writing of it, so perhaps you've experienced things I've not.
As for your feeling that CF fails to give a needed error, really there's no point bringing that up here. Bring it up instead to Adobe via the CF bug tracker. Of course, I wrote this here based on CF7. If you're getting an error in that, you may want to test it in CF9 before bothering. Again, no need to give the details here. This isn't the right place to do it.
As for your last comment, if you're referring to webcharts, it is "free" within CF. If instead you're referring to CF itself, then again you're entitled to your opinion but again I don't want to have that discussion in this blog entry.