Editor's Welcome

This is the 8 May 2003 issue of ChartLine, the information service from
Visual Mining designed to share knowledge, help you get things done
faster, get through tough spots, and keep you up to date on what's
happening here.

We will continue to publish one of these every so often, and hope you'll
find them useful. Feel free to tell us what you need to know and we'll
try to cover it for you. ChartLine is archived on the Visual Mining web
site in case you need to refer to a particular resource.

Sincerely,
Nan Fredman, Editor, &
The Visual Mining Team

Create Reporting Tools with NetCharts® Server

Reporting tools come in many varieties, from simple shareware functions to complex, enterprise-wide business intelligence systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clients who come to Visual Mining with a need for reporting tools typically need either a flexible, low-cost alternative to the big BI system, or they need to make web-based interactive reporting components that fit into their existing architectures. At a fraction of the cost of a big BI system, NetCharts Server is ideally suited for both of these requirements.

Many features make NetCharts Server a logical choice for a mid-range
capability reporting tool:

Award-winning reports, graphs, and tables
Create as many or as few of these as you need, when and how you need them. Use the wizards to get started very quickly with all three--active pages, graphs, and tables that interact with your data sources.

Smooth and easily configurable data access
Keep your data in your formats; we connect to, not reconfigure
your data sources. Powerful data access wizards make this otherwise difficult task simple enough for non-programmers.

A complete solution
You don't need to purchase any other tools to make it work - no extra parts or future upgrades are required for better functionality; you get everything you need in one package.

You do not have to build your entire reporting tool within NetCharts Server
If you work in an ASP environment, then use NetCharts Server just to
create your graphs and tables.

Hundreds of working examples—with code—to get you started
Find them both in the download files and on our web site.

Integrate NetCharts Server reporting tools into existing web application servers using installable toolkits
These software Toolkits make using NetCharts Server as easy as a
function call.

Built-in project and administration security access.

Training is offered as part of our packages to increase your ROI.

Featured Chart: Stock Chart Type - The Candlestick

Candlestick charts are specialized charts used to record and analyze the
selling prices of stocks, bonds, commodities, and such, with particular
attention to indications of price reversals. They are similar to the bar-type
stock chart used in the field of investments (our normal presentation of a
stock chart). Price is measured along the vertical axis, and time along the
horizontal axis. Vertical price scales can be shown on the left side,
right side, or both.

The basic candlestick symbol consists of a rectangular bar with a straight line extending from the top and bottom. This is an efficient way of seeing the item's performance at a glance. The price reversals are shown by coloring the candlestick's bar.

For filled (or darkened) symbols, the closing price is lower than the opening price. Then the symbol reads thusly:

Top of stick - High
Top of bar - Open
Bottom of bar - Close
Bottom of stick – Low

If the closing price is higher than the opening price, the symbol is
empty, or light-colored, and the symbol is read thus:

Top of stick - High
Top of bar - Close
Bottom of bar - Open
Bottom of stick - Low

Visual Mining stock charts support a combination of stock-bars having
high and low tick lines, as well as regular bar and line graph elements.
Creating the body of the candlestick depends on using two stacked bar sets together. The first bar in the set identifies the bottom of the candlestick bar, the second one the top of the candlestick bar. Because there are both dark and light candlestick bodies, there must also be two pair of bar sets. Additionally, each candlestick requires a stock-bar to provide the upper and lower sticks.

Any of our products can make this chart. See the source code.

NetCharts® Server with ASP Code Samples

NetCharts Server provides code samples for using the NetCharts Server
.NET/ASP Toolkit in the Development Console in the .NET/ASP Toolkit section. The sample code is also included in the NetCharts Server .NET/ASP Toolkit installation to assist developers when they are using the toolkit. Any chart type can be used by ASP developers using the .NET/ASP Toolkit. See more NetCharts Server ASP Code Examples.

When you are using NetCharts Server, you will have a fairly easy time including dynamic graphs and tables into your ASP projects. All that is needed is to install the .NET/ASP Toolkit that comes with NetCharts Server onto the same machine where IIS is running, which takes just a few minutes. Now, any resource from your NetCharts Server installation
can be easily and quickly integrated into your ASP environment. The following code example shows how easy it is to include a dynamic chart within an ASP page:

<%
Dim toolKit, myHashTable
Set toolKit = Server.CreateObject("NetChartsServer.NSToolKit")
Set myHashTable = Server.CreateObject("NetChartsServer.Hashtable")
toolKit.setProject "My First Project"
%>
<%=toolKit.getRolloverJavaScript()%>
<%
myHashTable.putValue "type", "PNG"
myHashTable.putValue "THELABELS", "Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday,Thursday"
myHashTable.putValue "THEDATA", "45,18,29,30"
%>
<%=toolKit.getChartAsImageAndMap("gallerychart.cdx", myHashTable)%>
<%=session("mimetype")%>
<%
Set toolKit = Nothing
%>

In this case, the chart image type, labels, and data are passed in as
variables. You don't even need to use these dynamic variables unless you
want to. As you can see, there are basically two calls to the NetCharts
Server Toolkit--to set up the rollovers, and then to call it to get the
chart and image map.

See the details in the NetCharts Server Application Developers Guide.

Handling Special Characters with URL Encoding

When integrating NetCharts Server directly into your web pages using URL's and not via a toolkit, if you find that your web applications or browsers are having problems with special ASCII characters, such as spaces, backslashes, forward slashes, apostrophes, and such, try URL encoding them. URL encoding is a simple method of encoding which converts spaces and other characters which may confuse the program reading the data. Simply substitute the code for the offending character.

For example, if you find that your Netscape browser is having trouble rendering our charts with titles, legends, or other text containing ampersands or spaces, you can replace the spaces with %20 and the ampersands with %26.

When passing a label through an ASP call, the problem with non-alphanumeric characters again crops up. If you were to try passing in dates with slashes in them, such as 05/02/2003, the date would not be interpreted correctly. This is another place to use URL encoding.

Here are some URL codes for special characters:

Space %20
Double quote (") %22
Dollar ("$") %24
Ampersand ("&") %26
Plus ("+") %2B
Comma (",") %2C
Forward slash/Virgule ("/") %2F
Colon (":") %3A
Semi-colon (";") %3B
Equals ("=") %3D
Question mark ("?") %3F
'At' symbol ("@") %40
'Less Than' symbol ("<") %3C
'Greater Than' symbol (">") %3E
'Pound' character ("#") %23
Percent character ("%") %25
Left Curly Brace ("{") %7B
Right Curly Brace ("}") %7D
Vertical Bar/Pipe ("|") %7C
Backslash ("\") %5C
Caret ("^") %5E
Tilde ("~") %7E
Left Square Bracket ("[") %5B
Right Square Bracket ("]") %5D
Grave Accent ("`") %60

NOTE - the NetCharts Server Toolkits take care of this problem for you!

You should not URL-encode any parameter values sent through the NetCharts Server Toolkits. Only parameters sent through a URL to NetCharts Server need to be URL Encoded - and this isn't our recommended method of using NetCharts Server.

NetCharts Server also provides the ability to display fonts from non-Latin
languages in graphs and popup labels. This feature utilizes the widely
recognized Unicode code pages in order to support many languages. Multiple languages and fonts can be simultaneously supported within each chart.

This feature is discussed in detail in Chapter 12 of the NetCharts Server Application Developers Guide.

Happy Charting!

Visual Mining's
News & Tips Letter
MAY 2003

IN THIS ISSUE:

1. Create Reporting Tools with NetCharts® Server
2. Featured Chart: Stock Chart Type - The Candlestick
3. NetCharts® Server with ASP Code Samples
4. Handling Special Characters with URL Encoding

You are receiving this
e-newletter because you subscribed to ChartLine on our website, downloaded one of Visual Mining's products, or are a customer.

Send comments and questions to chartline@visualmining.com

NetCharts and Visual Mining are registered trademarks of Visual Mining, Inc. All other product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

ChartLine Copyright © 2003
Visual Mining, Inc. All rights reserved.

Visual Mining, Inc.
15825 Shady Grove Rd, #20
Rockville, MD 20850
301.795.2200
www.visualmining.com
info@visualmining.com

ChartLine © 2003 Visual Mining, Inc.  All rights reserved.