Dojox Charting Tutorial – Part Six: Appendices

As I said in Part One, this series came about through an awareness of dojox charting and a desire to investigate its suitability to replace our current third-party solution. At the time I was not aware of NotesReconn on OpenNTF, which recently won second place in the TeamStudio Spotlight awards, and that’s definitely on my radar now as a product to investigate further. In this series I’ve references a number of useful references, but I’ve also come across more while writing up the series. So I wanted to put together a one-stop shop of useful resources on dojox charting.

Obviously the first point of reference is the dojocampus article on charting: http://docs.dojocampus.org/dojox/charting. Bear in mind that the demos don’t currently work in Internet Explorer 8.

A useful reference for all the parameters etc is the dojo api website: http://api.dojotoolkit.org/jsdoc/1.3.2/dojox.charting.Chart2D

The dojocampus article uses and references invaluable articles previously written by Doug McMaster and Eugene Lazutkin on Sitepen: http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2008/06/06/a-beginners-guide-to-dojo-charting-part-1-of-2/

From an XPages point of view, my starting point was Chris Connor’s very useful article: http://www.xsptalk.com/public/website/blog.nsf/dx/13112009111014CCOF4X.htm

Only in the last couple of days I also came across Glen Urban’s excellent article on dojox charting in classic web design, which also uses the javascript method of creating the chart: http://glenurban.me.uk/A55D03/Blog.nsf/dx/DojoChart.htm

And just yesterday, Lance Spellman, with Jeremy Hodge, have shown how the config for a chart could be passed to a standard custom control for a chart type http://xpagesblog.com/xpages-blog/2010/2/4/update-self-awareness-of-custom-controls-in-xpages-am-i-alon.html

If you want to use dojox charting via the web but your server is not yet 8.5.1, I would recommend using Dojomino, a database comprising all the dojo 1.3.2 files. Even with an 8.5.1 server, I still find it useful because it provides a readable version of the javascript files (the ones that come with the Notes Client install are compressed down to a single line): http://www.dojomino.com/

The code provided by Eugene Lazutkin to extend the tooltips for bar and column charts was a god-send: http://dojotoolkit.org/forum/dojox-dojox/dojox-support/custom-tooltips-clusteredbars-chart

Just this week Bob Balfe blogged about a variety of options for charting, and others in the community have expanded this into an excellent resource that there is no point in reproducing here: http://blog.balfes.net/?p=989. One option I would like to mention though is the charting sidebar plugin Julian Robichaux and Rob McDonagh showed at Lotusphere 2009, which I’ve had in my Notes Client for some time now.

I apologise for any link I have not mentioned. If you’re aware of a useful resource, by all means add a comment.

I prefaced this series by saying that I did not wish to denigrate on any previous work done in this area, nor do I want this series to deter anyone from adding their own thoughts. For me the quicker I can get up to speed on a new topic and identify if it can do what I need, the better. And I’m sure I’m not the only one, which is why I wanted to share my learning. I do not intend this to be the final word on charting (and I’m glad to see there is already evidence that it won’t be). There are probably areas that I have not covered (dojox data charts is something I’m aware of but haven’t looked at, zooming/scrolling/panning etc is another topic) and I may add other articles in the future. If there’s an area you think it would be useful for me to blog on, please let me know. But more importantly, if you’ve already investigated it and want to publish your experiences, I would very much welcome that.