Benefits of XtraCharts

I was chatting to our charting team lead recently and I asked him what features did he think XtraCharts had that would make it the choice for someone who needed charts in their application. I know what floats my boat about the product, but then again I don't have to write applications with charting in them, so I was anxious to hear his side of the story, from interactions he's had with customers either face-to-face or via support questions.

Funnily enough the first thing he came up with was ease of use. The XtraCharts Wizard. Think of Microsoft Excel, he said, think of how you create a chart there. You use a wizard.

Setting up charts can be difficult enough and you'd like to have a "sandbox" whereby you can try things out before committing to a particular look. So, our Charts Wizard gives you the chance to experiment with settings and to see the results there and then on your form in Visual Studio. Don't like what you see? Fine, just rollback the changes or press Cancel, and start over again. We provide mini- views, icons if you like, of what the chart would look like before you apply that type or style, much easier than trying to remember what a full-stacked spline area chart is. For best results the Wizard can be used either in the traditional page-by-page wizard interface, or you can jump directly to individual pages.

The developers implementing the charts shouldn't just be the ones to have all the cool toys either, and so our Charts Wizard can be invoked at run-time to enable your end-users to experiment with the look and feel of their charts. Of course, once you allow that, it's a given that you must be able to tweak and customize the wizard to do things like localize the UI, hide elements of the UI you don't want your end- users to use, or add new pages to the wizard for your particular chart solution.

All told, the ability to use the same Chart Wizard at design-time and at run-time is a strong indicator of the ease-of-use of XtraCharts.

OK, I said, what's next on your list? He thought a bit and came up with the number of business chart types. This is possibly where I might have started with my collection of XtraCharts benefits. Did you know that, as of v2008 vol.1, we have 42 (yes, indeed, Douglas Adams fans: 42)? Go on I say, what are they, expecting him to say something like "pie, pie with one slice removed, pie with all slices removed" and so on. Nope, he gave me the list:

2D-charts: Area, Candlestick, Full-Stacked Area, Full-Stacked Bar, Full-Stacked Spline Area, Line, Overlapped Range Bar, Point, Side-by-Side Bar, Side-by-Side Range Bar, Spline Area, Spline, Stacked Area, Stacked Bar, Stacked Spline Area, Step Line, Stock, Doughnut, Pie, Overlapped Gantt, Side-by-Side Gantt, Radar Area, Radar Line, Radar Point, Polar Area, Polar Line, Polar Point.

3D-charts: Area Chart, Full-Stacked Area, Full-Stacked Bar, Full-Stacked Spline Area, Line, Manhattan Bar, Side-by-Side Bar, Spline Area, Spline, Stacked Area, Stacked Bar, Stacked Spline Area, Step Line, Doughnut, Pie.

I must admit I goggled a bit at that and resolved to go back to the charts demo and check them out. (Radar Area? Sounds fascinating.) He pointed out that we have two visually distinct financial chart types: Stock and Candlestick. Stock charts were familiar to me (they show open/close and high/low prices as ticks on a vertical line, but candlestick charts were new for me.

Nice.

The next item on his "why you should use XtraCharts" list was data binding. To be precise, we can bind the X values and the series to any datasource that implements IList or IEnumerable (which covers the usual suspects like arrays and so on). Since a chart can show several series, each series can be bound to a different data source. I said I would expect that in a charting package and surely we had something beyond that. Indeed we do he said, we have Series Templates.

This sounded interesting. Take a data source that has, conceptually, several series in it distinguished by the value in a field of the data source. So, for example, imagine a data source that has monthly sales of widgets. You want to plot each widget's monthly sales on the same chart. Rather than have to construct individual data series for each widget for this job, you use a Series Template that automatically filters each series by widget.

Next up: different chart types plotted on a single chart. I told him to give me something interesting: surely all charting packages have that and it's almost not worth discussing it.

He got a glint in his eye, what about secondary axes? OK, I said, cautiously, surely this is similar to trumpeting that our soda cans have ring-pulls? That our bicycles have two wheels? Surely everyone does this? He said, sure, but we have no limits on the number of secondary axes you can plot on the same chart, be they X or Y axes.

Useful in certain circumstances, I'd have to admit, although going beyond two secondary axes or so might be difficult to read. But it's nice to have the flexibility than just a single secondary Y axis say.

"Hot-tracking" he says. Ah, I know about this, I had a long chat with a customer on the phone about this feature recently. Hot-tracking is when you specify certain regions of your control as "hot" so that when a mouse cursor moves over it or it gets clicked you get notified. You can then display a tool-tip or invoke some action. Not only is this feature available at run-time for your end-users, so you can quickly implement drill-down and such features, but it's also available at design-time so that you can easily edit particular chart elements using the property grid.

It was at this point that we got into the normal list of features that any charting product should have: automatic resizing of axes according to points being added or removed, gradient and other fills for area charts, skinning and theming, the usual image formats for saving charts, unlimited points in data series, etc.

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