creating charts

adavis

I need to do some line, bar, and pie charts. I've never done any before so I need to do a little research on how to do them. Any suggestions on where to start?

Thanks,
Alisa

BuzzLY

If you are looking for a way to create them yourself, you want to look into the GD library. I'm guessing that's not what you want, though. I would suggest starting with Hotscripts.com. They have a LOT of scripts, and you are bound to find something. They have a section dedicated to Graphs and Charts, with 52 entries. That should get you started.

Even if you are looking for a way to do them yourself, you should be able to look at the code for some of those scripts to see how they are doing the charts.

Good Luck!

adavis

BuzzLY,

Actually, I'm so new to this that I don't know exactly what I'm supposed to do. Big learning process 😃, but that's my favorite part about my job. I'm always asking for new stuff that no one's in the office has ever tried. I'm the only phper in the group. The rest are strictly perl. I'm slowly winning them over though.

I have this html output that I did in perl that reads a flat file and dumps into a mysql db, then spits out this monthly results of discrepancies. They want a multitude of charts to "see" how they are doing, hopefully improving. So line charts for month to month totals, pie charts for the monthly items list and so on.

Long story short, I think I'm supposed to be creating them myself. I'll take a look at the places you said. There are also a coulple of folk out here in another group who have done php charts where I might can go to get some questions answered.

thanks for the direction,
Alisa

BuzzLY

We were all "new to this" at one time or another. You'll probably pick it up fairly quickly.

Working with the GD library is actually pretty cool. You can do some neat things with it -- graphs and charts included. I used the GD2 library extensively when I created my color picker (in my sig).

I'm assuming "They" refers to management, right? Those that don't know anything about programming, and don't have any idea how difficult it will be to implement. Make sure you explain to them what it will entail before you get started -- they may think you will have something done in a week, when it might take much longer, and although you are learning lots of valuable things about PHP, the impression will be that you are making little progress. I know this from experience -- I lost a good job because of this.

Good Luck, and have fun!

Merve

People seem to like this graph creation class. I don't know how good is; I've never used it. But it seems to be the most popular, and it comes bundled with XAMPP...
Try it out then I guess... 🙂

adavis

Thanks Merve, I'll try it.