Tag Archives: charts

Using FusionCharts in SSRS reports

Microsoft’s SSRS is pretty advanced reporting system with multitude of advanced features. SSRS also has charting capabilities, but it’s somewhat lacking compared to more advanced desktop or web charting suites

On the other hand FusionCharts offers very cool charting package with gazillion of chart types and very cool features. But it uses JavaScript engine and renders charts client-side only!

What if there was a way to marry the two technologies together – to render cool FusionCharts in advanced SSRS repots? Continue reading →

FusionCharts.RenderChart and ASP.NET UpdatePanel

Fusion Charts

FusionCharts is a very cool cross-platform charting library – it offers huge variety of chart types and mind-blowing special effects. It also offers wide variety of chart rendering options both client- and server-side.

One such option is to render chart in an ASP.NET application. FusionCharts.dll that you get with the package offers handy FusionCharts.RenderChart method that generates all the client-side code you need to display a beautiful chart. Usually it is used something like this:

xLabel1.text = FusionCharts.RenderChart("FusionCharts/Pie2D.swf", "", sChartXmlData, sChartID, iChartWidth, iChartHeight, False, True)

where xLabel1 is a Label or Literal control in your ASPX page and FusionCharts.RenderChart is a function that accepts number of parameters, like chart type, chart XML data, dimensions etc.

It works very well until you want to render the chart inside of Microsoft Ajax UpdatePanel – then nothing works. This happens because FusionCharts.RenderChart function emits some HTML along with JavaScript that do not work during partial postback. FusionCharts suggest hooking up to UpdatePanel life-cycle events, but it’s seems like an overkill, and often doesn’t work (especially if you have a complex project, which this hookup can interfere with). But there’s an alternative solution.
Continue reading →