New Features of RadHtmlChart for ASP.NET AJAX Ship a Month Ahead of Schedule

With Q2 2012 release we shipped the first version of the RadHtmlChart control and, like any fledgling control, it did not have all the features you wanted to see, so we started working on them as soon as we got your feedback. We have promised we will add some of them in the Q3 2012 release (see our Roadmap), and I am glad to announce that we pushed hard and quite a lot of them are already available, far before the promised date :-) Let’s take a quick look around:

Client-side Events

This chart operates primarily on the client and it was inevitable that we would add a number of events that you can use to make your pages more responsive. Right now OnClientSeriesHovered and OnClientSeriesClicked are available and they offer tons of information about the item and the series for which they are fired. You can take a look at them (if you already haven’t) in the HtmlChart / Client-Side Events Online Demo that we added with the Q2 2012 SP1 – barely a month after the initial release of the control.

Drill-down Charts

Having events that you can hook to, makes it quite easy to implement the drill-down functionality which will allow you to show more details than a single chart could fit otherwise. By utilizing the OnClientSeriesClicked event you can initiate a small AJAX request that will add a new datasource for the chart. See how the RadAjaxManager allows this seamless integration in the HtmlChart / Drill-Down Chart Online Demo.

Printing the Charts

This is nothing special, like any printing the user has to go through her browser’s engine, so just hitting “print” for the page will suffice. Nevertheless, we added an article that shows a few interesting hints on how to isolate the printing: Printing RadHtmlChart. There is also a demo coming up that will show this in action – keep an eye out for the SP2 release next week!

This takes us to what the future will bring – in about a week the next official release – Q2 2012 SP2 is coming up and it will show you even more exciting features:

Exporting the RadHtmlChart

The HTML5 nature of the control and its client-side rendering have a lot of advantages, yet they also pose a major limitation in this regard – it is not a standard image you can save or export with a few clicks or lines of code. This is why we created a Code Library project that shows how you can export the chart to a PNG image or a PDF file. For this we added a special method - getSVGString() – that will get you the SVG rendering of the chart, regardless of the browser, so you can pass it to the server and export it. Check it out: Exporting RadHtmlChart to PNG and PDF.

Design-time Wizard

For those of you who wish to use the design surface and avoid the markup – we are going to ship a design-time chart configurator as early as the Q2 2012 SP2 release, more than a month before the promised Q3 J It took a lot of work, so stay tuned and give it a try as soon as it goes live!

What’s next

We are still working hard to give you more and even more features are still in the oven for the big release in October. The databinding is getting a big revamp, the AreaChart is just around the corner, multiple Y-axes are coming up, some appearance customizations are being prepared as well and the templates for the tooltips and labels are in our sights, too.

As you can see we have been very busy, but we are not backing down. Once a release is out – grab it and test it, then tell us what you think. Your feedback is what can ultimately determine a feature’s implementation.