Having a chart control in your arsenal is of great value because it visualizes significant information in an easily digestible manner. This is of great use for numerous scenarios - showing statistical data, displaying revenue and flow of numerical data, implementing reports, assembling analytics solutions, for pure scientific purposes or just for fun. A chart can be displayed in many different manners, e.g as shown below:
Implementing a chart solution, however, is a pretty time-consuming task and that is why we at Telerik decided to provide this powerful data visualization tool out of the box for our customers. With the new HtmlChart for ASP.NET AJAX you can have the summarized information displayed in a beautiful chart by simply setting a few properties, thus saving time and effort that you can put in implementing your custom business logic instead.
One might ask why we have developed RadHtmlChart when we already have RadChart? The main difference is that RadHtmlChart utilizes the latest technologies available today, as it is built on top of HTML5 and uses SVG under modern browsers and VML under old ones. We will soon publish a dedicated blog post providing a more detailed comparison between RadHtmlChart and RadChart in order to give you guidelines to help you when taking decision which one to choose and whether to upgrade and replace or not RadChart with RadHtmlChart for your particular case. Stay tuned!
The main features of Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX HtmlChart are:
- Pure client side rendering reducing server load
The chart is created entirely on the client through JavaScript which is a performance boost and you also get advantages of that without the need to write any custom JavaScript or to serialize your server data manually and send it to the client.
- Binding to various server-side datasources in the nice, old manner. Ability to control when to bind with a callback to even boost performance more!
The chart can be bound exactly in the same way you bind any other server databound control. The data is automatically extracted and serialized and sent to the client – you do not take care of that, you simply bind it the way you already know! As simple as that – and you get advantages of new modern approaches of client-side binding without the need to actually implement them, through binding to a server-side datasource!
A callback to use lazy initialization is provided – you can send the data to client and bind the chart at certain moment, e.g when the chart becomes visible / e.g in a scenario when it is in page view which is not initially visible/. Why should you have the data sent and the chart bound when not visible ? You can have the page lightweight till the chart is really needed – then load it on demand! This is controlled by a single server property in 2 general cases and only an additional simple client-side method in the case with most fine tuning! You can see this in action below :
http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/htmlchart/examples/databinding/loadingdata/defaultcs.aspx - Variety of different charts
The HtmlChart for ASP.NET AJAX offers variety of different chart types – Bar, Stacked Bar, Column, Stacked Column, Line, Pie, Scatter and Scatter Line, samples of some of them are here:
New chart types will be added as well in future. You can take a look at all currently available types in the “Chart Types” section of our online demos below:
http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/htmlchart/examples/overview/defaultcs.aspx
Other goodies – animation effect, ease of use, server API for programmatic creation, easy integration with other Telerik and standard ASP.NET controls, set of predefined skins, etc.
The RadHtmlChart control joined Telerik’s RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX with the Q2 2012 release – it offers much functionality in its first version but it is still a baby! We are considering further extending it in future, so please share your comments and feature requests with us. We will be glad to take them into account and make your development even more pleasant and easier! Doing our best to deliver more than expected to make our customers happy is one of our main priorities and having your opinion helps us do that.
