ASP.NET Dynamic Charting Controls

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Introduction

This illustrates how to build dynamic charts on the web using the ASP.NET chart controls. The earlier article provides you with an outline of the ASP.NET chart control. In my earlier article, the points are binded statically as shown below:

<Points> 
    <asp:DataPoint AxisLabel="jon" XValue="5" YValues="4" />
    <asp:DataPoint AxisLabel="kon" XValue="15" YValues="44" />
    <asp:DataPoint AxisLabel="pol" XValue="85" YValues="90" />
</Points> 

But no one is really interested in static charts. Graphs should be generated dynamically from datasources like Collection objects, datasources, etc.

Background

This article is the continuation of the below article:

• ASP.NET Charting Controls

Generating Dynamic Charts

This article mainly focuses on the dynamism of the charts, i.e adding the titles, series and datapoints dynamically. There are various ways we can generate the graphs dynamically but I could only present two methods.

Adding Titles

We can add the title in the below manner. Here Chart1 is the chart object id. By using the method Titles.Add() we can add the title to the chart.

Chart1.Titles.Add("Pass percentage of Students")

Adding Series

Similar to titles, we can also add the series label by Series.Add() method. Here Pass percentage is the legend of the series.

Chart1.Series.Add("Pass percentage") 

Add Points and Axis Label

Finally we need to add the points to the series. Here the Series(0) indicate the first series.

There are two methods to add the points:

1. By using AddXY, Add, AddY overloading methods
2. By using the DataBindXY overloading method

Method 1

Points.AddXY method is used to add the X and Y points to the chart. We can also add the axis label by assigning the labels to Points.Item(j).AxisLabel property. Here Item(j) indicates the J^th point.

Dim Yr As Int16 = 2000 
Dim j As Int16 = 0
For i As Integer = 1 To 9
    Chart1.Series(0).Points.AddXY(i + 10, i + 15)
    Chart1.Series(0).Points.Item(j).AxisLabel = Yr
    Yr = Yr + 1
    j = j + 1
Next

Method 2

By using the DataBindXY method, we can directly bind the X,Y coordinates or even overload method is available for X, Y and Label:

 Dim xval As String() = {"Peter", "Andrew", "Julie", "Mary", "Dave"}
 Dim yval As Double() = {2, 6, 4, 5, 3} 
 Chart2.Series(0).Points.DataBindXY(xval, yval)

Here DataBindXY has two overload methods:

1. Takes X Axis, Y Axis
2. Takes X Axis, X Field, Y Axis

In the above manner, we add the points to the charts. We can improve the interface by changing the properties of the control.

History

• 29^th December, 2008: Initial post