F9 Group Marketing and Technology Blog

The Chart Web control makes it easy to display a chart in an ASP.NET web page – simply drag the Chart control onto the page, set a few properties and either bind it to a data source control or write a few lines of code that get and bind the data of interest. When a page with a Chart control is visited by a user, the Chart control renders an <img> element on the page that displays the rendered chart. The Chart control is great for displaying a chart on a web page, but what if a user wants to view that chart offline, or send the chart to a colleague? In an earlier installment, Programmatically Generating Chart Images , we examined a number of ways to generate the chart image programmatically. This technique is useful if you want to modify the chart image before displaying it (to, say, add a watermark) or if you want to send the chart to a recipient via email. This technique can also be used to allow the visitor to export the chart image into an alternative format. This article shows how to let users export a chart from a web page to an alternative format. Specifically, we’ll look at adding an “Export” button to the chart web page that, when clicked, exports the chart displayed in the web page to either an image file that can be downloaded or as a PDF file. Read on to learn more! Read More >

The Microsoft Chart controls are a series of classes in the System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting namespace that allow web developers to ability to add charts to their ASP.NET applications. The most pertinent charting-related class is the Chart class , which contains information about the chart’s appearance, series, charting areas, and so forth. In most of the demos and code samples we’ve explored thus far, we’ve used the Chart class as a Web control, adding the <asp:Chart> declarative markup to our ASP.NET page, setting a few properties and, occasionally, writing a few lines of code. When used as a Web control, the Chart class both creates the chart (as an image) and then renders an <img> element that points to the generated chart image. Using the Chart Web control is a standard practice in a WebForms application, but it is not suggested when building an ASP.NET MVC application. (While it is possible to add Web controls – including the Chat Web control – to the views of an ASP.NET MVC application, it is generally frowned upon.) So, if we can’t use the Chart Web control in an ASP.NET MVC application, how do we display a chart? In addition to being used as a Web control, the Chart class can also be used programmatically

By Quentin Zervaas. One useful feature of Google Maps is the ability to generate a static image of any longitude and latitude that you desire, as opposed to using the normal JavaScript-based interactive map. In this article I will show you how to request such static images. We will then combine this technique with the geocoder we created in the article Geocoding with PHP and the Google Maps API.