PullMonkey Blog

Open Flash Chart II – OFC Object Creators

Thought I would try and make things a little more flexible. In doing so, two new OFC Object creators came to life. You all may recall the very basic:

open_flash_chart_object(600,300,'/test_it/graph_test')

And maybe not, well either way, I am going to describe its functionality here plus the functionality of the two new object creators.

open_flash_chart_object()

Usage:

This method returns only the graph html:

@graph = open_flash_chart_object(....)

Arguments

• width (required)
• height (required)
• url (required)
• use_swfobject (optional and defaults to true)
• base (optional and defaults to "/")
• swf_file_name (optional and defaults to "open-flash-chart.swf")

open_flash_chart_object_and_div_name()

Usage:

This method will return, not only the html for the graph but also the div_name for use with javascript manipulation:

@graph, @div_name = open_flash_chart_object_and_div_name(...)

Arguments

• width (required)
• height (required)
• url (required)
• use_swfobject (optional and defaults to true)
• base (optional and defaults to "/")
• swf_file_name (optional and defaults to "open-flash-chart.swf")

open_flash_chart_object_from_hash()

Usage:

This method will return the graph html, but gives you absolute control over quite a few things, most importantly div_name.

@graph = open_flash_chart_object_from_hash(...)

Additional Usage:

@graph = open_flash_chart_object_from_hash("/test_it/graph_code", :div_name => 'my_div_name', :width => 600)

@graph = open_flash_chart_object_from_hash("/test_it/graph_code", :base => '/projects', :height => 600)

Arguments

• url (required)
• options (optional)
  • div_name (defaults to "flash_content_[random string]")
  • base (defaults to "/")
  • swf_file_name (defaults to "open-flash-chart.swf")
  • width (defaults to 550)
  • height (defaults to 300)
  • protocol (defaults to "http")
  • obj_id (defaults to "chart_[random string]")

Well, there it is, good luck and have fun.

Open Flash Chart II – Bar Graphs with on-click

Building on line graph clicking, thanks to the support of a few other people (mentioned throughout the article) we now have bar graph clicking as well. The only down side (if you want to call it that) is that it is experimental in the sense that the open flash chart swf object had to be updated, and the update is not part of the official OFC release (at least not at the time of this writing). No big deal though, just be aware. It is however part of the OFC rails plugin release.
Big thanks goes to Eric for his work on the action script for the bar clicking open-flash-chart swf file - see this forum entry for more details.
Obvious thanks also goes to monk.e.boy.

Ok, so two things to note for this to work:

1. Pull the latest from github and make sure to get Eric's swf file (under the assets directory - open-flash-chart-bar-clicking.swf ) and place it under RAILS_ROOT/public
2. The call to open_flash_chart_object() has changed to accept an optional parameter for the swf file name. I am leaving the original for use as open-flash-chart.swf (which is the default for the swf_file_name param) and added Eric's as open-flash-chart-bar-clicking.swf. See the example below for usage.

The changes that were made can be found here.

Here is the graph we are after in this example (click the bars to see what happens):

More Open Flash Chart II examples.

And here is the code (the controller):

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class TestItController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @graph = open_flash_chart_object(600,300,"/test_it/graph_code", true, "/", "open-flash-chart-bar-clicking.swf")
  end

  def graph_code
    title = Title.new("Bar on-click Example")
    bar = BarGlass.new
    # NOTE ... the next two lines are if you want each bar to have a different response when clicked
    bar_values = (1..9).to_a.map{|x| bv = BarValue.new(x); bv.on_click = "alert('hello, my value is #{x}')"; bv}
    bar.set_values(bar_values)
    # if you want a more generic response across all bars, then the following lines would do:
    # bar.on_click = "alert('hello there')"
    # bar.set_values((1..9).to_a)
    chart = OpenFlashChart.new
    chart.set_title(title)
    chart.add_element(bar)
    render :text => chart.to_s
  end
end

And in your view (index.html.erb):

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<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/swfobject.js"></script>
<%= @graph %>

Good Luck!