Inovista Microcharts part 2

October 20, 2009 by: David Lai

In my previous article I gave an overview of the Microcharts plug-in for Xcelsius and a quick example of creating a Microcharts Datatable. In addition, I explained how to replicate the same example in Xcelsius using workarounds that would make development much more timely and harder to maintain.

In this article I would like to talk about some important features that Inovista Microcharts has that Xcelsius cannot reproduce. A very important table component that Xcelsius lacks is the ability to expand and contract your rows like a tree. Inovista has a component called a “Microchart Tree Grid” that allows a user to expand and contract rows so that users can group their rows accordingly. This is extremely important if we don’t want to clutter a table view with too many rows.

Below is a sample that I have taken from the Inovista website that shows a Tree table in action.

[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”dynamic” fversion=”8.0.0″ useexpressinstall=”true” movie=”http://www.davidlai101.com/blog/media/blogs/bobj/microcharts/treegrid.swf ” width=”550″ height=”500″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]Get Adobe Flash player
[/kml_flashembed]

Looking further into the example, there are 2 additional components inside the tree table that Xcelsius cannot reproduce. First of all, Xcelsius does not have the ability to create a bulletgraph, which is quite a popular item used in dashboards. In addition, the ability to create checkmarks and other shapes would be very hard to reproduce in Xcelsius; thus is another component lacking in Xcelsius since many dashboards contain checkmarks and stars for ratings. The option to put the x-axis scale on the header or y-axis scale on each graph is also a useful feature that Inovista provides for the Microcharts table and Microcharts treegrid. Finally the ability to move the columns around is also another useful feature that Xcelsius does not allow.

There are however, a few problems that remain with the treegrid which comes mainly from the column sorting ability. Please use the example below as a reference.
[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”dynamic” fversion=”8.0.0″ useexpressinstall=”true” movie=”http://www.davidlai101.com/blog/media/blogs/bobj/microcharts/example.swf” width=”550″ height=”500″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]Get Adobe Flash player
[/kml_flashembed]
The first problem comes from the fact that sorting only occurs alphabetically and cannot be modified to be sorted numerically. For example if we have the following numbers 1, 2, 19; the sort order will be 1, 19, 2 which is incorrect. The next problem is that the Microcharts treegrid doesn’t sort by parent and then child. For example if you expand the parent nodes and try to sort the items, the result will be a messed up list where child nodes are all over the place.

Sorting is an important element but not a show stopper so hopefully the author fixes these problems for the next Inovista release.

The final important feature that Inovista provides that Xcelsius cannot reproduce is the IMT slider, which is similar to the slider that you find in the finance.google.com charts and biz.yahoo.com charts. This is extremely useful as it allows users to intuitively view a window of time that they are interested in.
[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”dynamic” fversion=”8.0.0″ useexpressinstall=”true” movie=”http://www.davidlai101.com/blog/media/blogs/bobj/microcharts/imtslider.swf” width=”550″ height=”500″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]Get Adobe Flash player
[/kml_flashembed]

Comments

One Response to “Inovista Microcharts part 2”
  1. Jxu says:

    I like your blog! It is very helpful!

    Keep it up!

    jxu

Leave a Reply


4 − = zero