Dundas Chart For ASP.NET, Enterprise Edition:
Tackle just about any corporate charting challenge you can think of

By Jonathan Goodyear, angryCoder.com

There are literally dozens of charting solutions available today for ASP.NET developers and most of them do a pretty good job in the most commonly encountered situations. Some of them do a poor job in just about every situation. However, a few charting components exist that do an outstanding job in just about every situation that they are implemented. One of those has to be Dundas Chart for ASP.NET, the Enterprise Edition. The term "Enterprise" is not used as a marketing gimmick here, nor is it a Star Trek reference. It is used to differentiate it from the Professional Edition as a charting solution that can be used in almost any corporate situation imaginable. The Enterprise Edition provides numerous options for statistical and financial formulas, many of which I have never heard of. Being an average math student myself, it makes my brain hurt just to think of the calculations that go into computing an "Exponential Moving Average" or "Inverse F Cumulative Distribution" and these are only two of the dozens of chart types provided with the Enterprise Edition. The good folks at Dundas Software have already paid some smart developers - who probably were much better than average math students - to do all the calculations necessary for your company to display a chart of forecasted sales and revenue. There is no reason that I can think of to pay an in-house development shop to redo the calculations for one chart type for probably much more than what Dundas Chart costs for dozens of advanced chart types.

Design-Time Integration

As you would expect from a full-featured product, Dundas Chart takes complete advantage of Visual Studio.NET's improved component integration abilities for web applications. The first thing that struck me as I dropped the Dundas Chart control onto a web page for the first time was the clean, well-done wizard that immediately popped up. It is not one of those step-by-step wizards where you have to keep clicking the "Back" button if you need to change something five option screens back. As you can see from Figure 1, the Dundas Chart wizard is more of an advanced property browser that makes it very easy to make a change to the chart setup and see the results of your change on the web page designer without even leaving the modal wizard. This might seem like a small point to make but I have tried some very good charting components that had absolutely awful wizards and I wound up not using those components for that reason. It is obvious to me that a lot of thought went into the design of the Dundas Chart wizard and, consequently, it made getting up and running with a charting solution very fast, easy and relatively painless. I don't think I can stress enough how important these first impressions are when judging a component.

Figure 1: The Dundas Chart wizard is an extremely easy to use and efficient way to customize the look and feel of your chart.

Down to the Bare Metal

As with just about everything else in ASP.NET, you can get right down to the bare metal of the code and customize the chart to the smallest detail. While I would suggest using the wizard to create the chart and setup its appearance you can accomplish the same thing using the Dundas Chart server control tags in the HTML source or you can even create the chart programmatically at run-time in the code-behind for the web page. How you implement the chart control is completely up to you.

Of course, you can't create a chart without some data. Like the ASP.NET DataGrid, data can be added to the Dundas Chart bit by bit programmatically or it can be added in a single databinding operation. In fact, the X and Y axes can each be bound to different data sources in different ways. The object which you used to bind the chart merely has to implement the IEnumerable interface. Thankfully, this is consistent with how databinding works elsewhere in the .NET Framework. I always appreciate components that take a development approach that is consistent with the platform they are written for.

My Own Charting Problem

My brief, yet frustrating career as a custom, web-based chart developer culminated in an attempt several years ago to create Gantt charts in ASP 2.0 for a development team I was leading. See Figure 2 if you're not familiar with what a Gantt chart is. Much like Microsoft Project, yet simpler and customized for my needs, I wanted to be able to graphically display who should be working on what task on what day. This type of chart is ideal for project planning and tracking and it's just the type of thing that a development manager needs to efficiently use his or her resources. However, I quickly realized that trying to create my own Gantt charts was not the most efficient use of my most important resource, my time. I was forced to turn to a charting component and was satisfied with the results, although it still seemed overly complicated.

So after having this experience, this was one of the first chart types I tried to implement when trying out Dundas Chart for the first time and I was truly amazed at the ease with which Gantt charts are now possible to create. Although part of this simplicity can be credited to what the .NET Framework makes possible, the Dundas people have done an admirable job at making the object model straight-forward enough for any developer to understand. The consequence of this is that complicated chart types, like Gantt charts, are easier to create than they have ever been.

Figure 2: Gantt charts are ideal for graphically displaying all the tasks necessary to complete a project over its lifetime.

Conclusion

In all honesty, I normally try to avoid third-party components. It has been my experience that they perform adequately for most jobs but the one time you need them to do something a little bit out-of-step with everyday development they're simply not up to the task. In those cases I have wasted literally days of development time trying to get the component to do something its designers never imagined or chose not to account for. Or, even worse, I have had to endure many hours on the phone with product support while they attempted to determine what the exact capabilities of their component were. So I normally code everything from scratch because I know what my exact capabilities are and in the amount of time it takes me to read the documentation for a component I can usually have a solution coded. However, since I know what I am capable of, I certainly know that I am not capable of coding a flexible solution that can correctly compute a "Chaikin Oscillator" chart or even a Gantt chart. So, when it comes to creating advanced charts for the web, I am very happy to turn those responsibilities over to the more than capable Dundas Chart.

In almost every article I write I include some example code to demonstrate the technique or product that I am writing about. However, in this case, the sample code and projects that come with the evaluation version of Dundas Chart are really excellent and do a much better job than I could do in a small code blurb. They display just about every option you can think of and even include the Visual Studio.NET projects and Access databases necessary to get the most out of the samples as quickly as possible. So, if you're a corporate developer or need to create charts that use advanced statistical and financial formulas then I strongly suggest you browse to www.dundas.com and download the latest evaluation version of Dundas Chart for ASP.NET, Enterprise Edition.