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When it comes to complex business data analysis, a visualization tool that allows for multi-dimensional cross-tabular reports is invaluable. This is why many of you will gladly welcome Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX PivotGrid - a data summarization control allowing end-users to gain unparalleled insights into their business processes and operations.

Pivot Grid Preview

Let’s check the key features!

Data grouping and aggregates

RadPivotGrid lets you quickly group large amounts of data into neat informative summaries with valuable aggregate calculations. The control features two axes of grouping – a row and a column one, visually represented by an area respectively on the lower left and on the top right of the control.

Three-dimensional analysis

Two-dimensional analysis

Grouping the data, however, is half of the job as we need the third dimension to complete the picture. 

Three-dimensions

Three-dimension pivot grid

And that’s where the aggregate fields come into play – they are located in a special area in the top left corner of the control and represent those data columns or properties which values will be calculated into aggregate summaries. Moreover, each axis allows the data to be aggregated by multiple dimensions or fields.

Data cube

Multi-dimensional pivot grid

Row and column fields

Once grouped, the row and column fields will give you the opportunity to expand/collapse, sort and, soon to come, filter and group the data into ranges. In addition, all fields can be easily reordered by dragging them between the field areas and thus allowing to easily gain a new view and respectively layout of the information being analyzed.

Drag and drop in RadPivotGrid

And what is a really handy feature of RadPivotGrid’s – the state of the data (be it expanded or collapsed, sorted, filtered or grouped into ranges) is persisted during page navigation.

Paging and Scrolling

Speaking of paging, we come to the next good mark for Telerik’s PivotGrid – the capability to slice data into smaller more manageable chunks by taking advantage of its paging mechanism. However, if that does not suit your business needs or you need large pieces of data displayed at once, the control offers horizontal and vertical scrolling so that the information looked for can be quickly navigated to.


Paging and scrolling in RadPivotGrid

Together with the fancy scrolling, the RadPivotGrid control has a dynamic calculation of all rows height and all columns width. If you do not set any height (to the rows) or any width (to the columns) the control is smart enough to show all rows and columns into their optimal sizes.    

Optimal row/column sizes in RadPivotGrid

Data binding

We quickly went through data manipulation with RadPivotGrid but did not mention anything about where the data will be coming from. Data-binding to native data-source controls is seamless with RadPivotGrid as well as extracting data from  various data sources which implement the IEnumerable, IList, IQueryable or ICustomTypeDescriptor interfaces.

Performance

And last but not least, Telerik’s PivotGrid for ASP.NET AJAX is powered by a smart data engine that is optimized to perform the grouping and aggregate calculations into parallel threads to achieve optimal performance. This, however, does not preclude carefully planning the size of the pivot reports and never leaving out-of-sight the browsers’ limited capacity in terms of speed when it comes to rendering large amounts of html.

Next Steps

RadPivotGrid is certainly a newly-fledged control in development, but still a major one, since it completes Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX control suite to make it really the best of its breed. We already glimpsed some of its coming improvements, but there is more to come in terms of layouts, configuration, caching. Do stand by for those while trying the current features in the meantime.

I hope that you will find this post helpful. If you have any suggestions, requirements or any other requests about our PivotGrid, now is the time to share it with us. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. 


About the Author

Tsvetoslav Kovachev

Tsvetoslav Kovachev is a developer.

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