Face it. Customers, and especially managers, like graphs. The visual feedback they get from it saves them time going through detailed reports. Generating reports and graphs in Domino has been described before, but it never hurts to have options. If you would like to create your first fancy web graph in minutes, then read on...

The product

For this article I used Fusion Charts, a very popular, yet affordable set of Flash charts that you can easily include in your web development platform of choice. You can download a free fully featured evaluation copy of this product here. The only limitation in the evaluation copy is the presence of company credits.

The graph demo

In this article I'm showing you one simple graph. I haven't created it myself, it is taken directly from the samples that come with the product. I slightly altered it and integrated it into a Domino database. Here's an indication of what it looks like. Click on the image to see the actual Flash graph inside the online Domino database(it contains an animated effect)

Like it? Well, this isn't the best graph. Go check out the graph gallery if you like to see better examples. For now the point is to just get things working.

The graph database

If you would like to know how the graph is integrated in Domino, please first download the demo database and open it in Designer. Now let's see how this works...

You need three things to integrate a Fusion Chart into a Domino database:

1. The chart Flash files
2. Your data, in XML format
3. A page or form that links to a graph and the source of the data

1. The Flash files

The Flash files come with the product, in the "Charts" directory. There's actually no need to include these SWF files in your design. Alternatively, you can place them on a central server somewhere and refer to them. Since I don't like that deployment dependency, I much rather make them available in the Design. This makes it also possible to replicate them to local servers across the globe.

In the Design, I simply attached all the files into the design as File Resources. If you're still on R5, you can include them as Image Resources.

2. Your data, in XML format

Fusion Charts expects all your data to be in XML format. This is great actually, as that makes it usable on pretty much every web development platform. In the demo database, the XML data is a simple page called "data.xml" that contains static data. In a real life scenario, you will probably combine a page with an embedded view, or perhaps use an agent to generate XML from dynamic data. As long as you have a Domino URL that returns the XML, all is good.

3. Linking the data to the graph

The last step is to link your data to the graph. In the demo database, this is done on the form "Example graph". Let's analyze this form.

The top row of the Form contains three hidden fields. "DataURL" contains the formula that calculates the URL to your XML data. In the example, the same data will be used to create both a graph and a grid. The URL I calculate in the field is absolute, but you can also make it relative. beware though, the URL must always end with a valid Domino URL command! Thus to open a page called "data.xml" you need to use "data.xml?openpage" and not just "data.xml". The second and third hidden field calculate the URL of the Flash files (graph and grid), which we attached as File Resources earlier.

The rest of the form is a large part of pass-thru HTML. All this HTML is needed to embed the Flash objects on the web page. The reason everything is on there twice, is that not all browsers handle the object tag the same. Inside the HTML you see a few computed text entries, marked in green. These value simply refer to the precalculated values of our hidden fields. They point to the Flash file, and the data input file. That's all there is to it!

Conclusion

Integrating pretty web charts into Domino data is extremely simple and affordable. The Fusion Charts product has a lot more capabilities than demonstrated in this article. The documentation that comes with it is extensive, and easy to pick up. Give it a try, you will not regret it.

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