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The Microsoft Chart controls make it easy to take data from a database or some other data store and present it as a chart. As discussed in Plotting Chart Data , the Chart controls offer a myriad of ways to get data into a chart. You can add the data programmatically, point-by-point, or you can bind an ADO.NET DataTable directly to the Chart. You can even use declarative data source controls, like the SqlDataSource or ObjectDataSource controls. In addition to converting your specified data points into a chart image, the Chart controls also include a wealth of statistical formulae that you can use to analyze the plotted data. For example, with a single line of code you determine the mean (average) value for data in a particular series. Likewise, with one line of code you can get the median, variance, or standard deviation. These values can be displayed as text on the page or as a stripe line on the chart itself

The Microsoft Chart controls demos we have examined so far all use the Chart Web control to position the chart image on the web page and to configure a number of its stylistic settings. For example, while the Plotting Chart Data article showed several demos illustrating the different ways to specify the points to plot on the chart surface, all of these demos used a Chart Web control to indicate where on the page the chart should appear, along with its dimensions, its series, its chart areas, its colors, and so on. While the Chart Web control makes it easy to get started with the chart, it is not necessary. From the ASP.NET page’s code-behind class you can: programmatically create a Chart object; specify its width, height, colors, and other display-related properties; plot the charts data points through any of the mechanisms discussed in Plotting Chart Data ; and generate an image for the chart in a number of different image formats, saving the image data to a file or to a stream. Being able to programmatically configure the chart and generate the chart image is useful if you want to modify the chart image in some way before displaying it. Perhaps you want to add a watermark, or embed it inside a PDF file . Maybe you don’t want to display it at all, but instead want to send it as an attachment in an email, or save the image to the web server’s file system or to the database. Whatever the scenario, the good news is that the Microsoft Chart controls make it easy to programmatically create, customize, and generate the chart image. This article looks at how to programmatically create a chart. Specifically, we’ll see how to dynamically add a watermark to the generated chart image, as well as how to email the chart to a recipient. The demos in this installment do not use the Chart Web control at all; instead, the charts in these demos are created and rendered directly from the ASP.NET pages’ code-behind classes. Read on to learn more! Read More >

The Microsoft Chart controls make it easy to take data – such as sales numbers, website traffic statistics, and so on – and turn it into a chart, which can be saved to an image file or displayed from a web page. In Plotting Chart Data we examined a myriad of ways to turn data into a chart, including: plotting the chart data point by point; binding data to the Chart’s Points collection; programmatically binding data structured data to the chart; and declaratively binding data using one of ASP.NET’s data source controls, such as the SqlDataSource or ObjectDataSource. Oftentimes, web pages that display charts include user interface elements that let the user filter or sort the plotted data. For example, when viewing a chart of expenses, the user may want to only show expenses between two dates, or may want to sort the expenses by category. One way to provide such functionality is to sort or filter the data before binding it to the chart. Alternatively, you can bind the original data to the chart and then instruct the Chart control to sort the data, or to apply a filter. This article shows how to use these sorting and filtering capabilities. Read on to learn more! Read More >