Home / Community & Support / Developer Productivity Tools Forums / WPF > Chart > "Customizeable"

• Tormod

  Posted on Apr 22, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi.
  
  I do not know WPF (yet) and I haven't tried the controls, but from the demos it seems that the customization options for the controls is largely about color, linestyle and gradients.
  
  I am looking for a WPF set which gives options to customize all visuals. Some customers may want click-handling on the chart legends, some want visuals like engineering units on top of the graph, some like it under, some would like it as tooltip. Some would like the various curves to be possible to enable/disable. Some would like to highlight a set of curves. Some would like other metadata to be drawn onto the graph backdrop. Some present a jpg from mspaint and state that they want it "exactly like that".
  
  How customizeable are the WPF radcontrols from Telerik? Are their visuals fully expressed in XAML that I can edit so that I for example easily can remove/add a stackpanel with dimmed curve legends within the graph? 
  
  That kind of stuff.
  
  The screen real estate is very important, so it is important that, if I choose to not use the axis, title, legends, border etc, that they collapses and do not take up space. ie, That it can be stripped down to operate pretty much "fullscreen" within another wpf control container.

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• Hristo Hristo

  Posted on Apr 23, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi Tormod,
  
  Thank you for your interest in our controls. When speaking about customizations there are always two aspects of this matter. First are the functional customizations and if we are strictly speaking about our Chart control for WPF that means giving our clients the possibilities to hide or show X and Y axis, legends, labels, to allow tooltips (which may show another chart or any other of our WPF controls), point marks, drill down capabilities, and many more clearly shown in our online demo examples. I think it won’t be a lack of modesty to claim that our charts are pretty much customizable. Of course, the second aspect of customization is the visual effects of the controls and their appearance. You are right that currently it seems our chart allows only customizations for colors and linestyles, but we are investing a lot of time and resources to improve the Blend support for our Chart control in order to cover all features and functional customizations with visual counterparts. We are keeping high hopes that with our 2009 Q2 (expecting in the beginning of July) we will be able to introduce a lot of improvements in the right direction. Also if you are looking for any specific feature or you want to accomplish a certain scenario with our Chart control, please let us know and we will do our best to provide you with appropriate assistance.
  
  Again thank you for you questions and feedback, and I will be happy to hear back from you once the Q2 release is out or with any other feedback on what do you think will bring most value for our clients in terms of improving the customizability of our Chart control.
  
  Regards,
  Hristo
  the Telerik team

  
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• Mr B

  Posted on May 12, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi there,
  
  I have a bit of a follow up question on this topic.  A very specific one actually.
  We're doing a project where the client wants to have a specific 3d graph included.  Just as Tormod said, they want it "exactly like that", only they showed us a little wmv instead of a jpg :)
  
  Since the project is on a very thight schedule, we are considering controls such as the ones you offer if they, off course, meet our needs.
  To be more specific, it's the donut diagram we are interested in.
  I've scrolled through the help file of the evaluation version, but couldn't immediatly find what I'm looking for.
  
  I was wondering to what extent the properties of the donut shape were customisable.  To be more specific, what we would need is actually half of a donut (so half a circle with half a hole in the middle).  I'm guessing that, if by default the donut always "closes" completely, one could "fake" this by adding an item worth of 50% to the graph with transparent colors or something?  Would such a thing work?
  
  Also, and this is an important aspect... we would need to alter the "thickness" of the donut.  It should be more like a "disk" or something and the hole would need to be smaller as well.
  
  Are these things that are easily adaptable?  Or would we need to come up with a totally different 3d model template of some kind, like in the bar example where the bars were replaced by star shaped models?
  
  If this is possible, could you explain (in a nutshell) what would need to be done to alter the donut shape to resemble what I've described?  That would be very helpfull to us so that we can have an idea of the workload that comes with it.
  
  Thanks in advance for the information,
  Greetings

  Reply

• Velin Velin

  Posted on May 15, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi,
  
  Thanks for your interest in RadChart for WPF.
  
  Currently, RadChart does not expose properties allowing manipulation of the "Thickness" nor the "InnerRadius" properties of the doughnut chart type. However, it seems reasonable to introduce these properties in a future version of the control.
  
  As for your other question - you have correctly guessed that by default the doughnut chart is a complete circle. It is possible, however, to trick it by adding a transparent doughnut slice with value equal to the sum of the "real" slices. As a preparatory task it will be necessary for you to override the doughnut materials palette and add transparent colors  for the additional slice.
  
  I have attached a simple application demonstrating the described tasks.
  
  
  Sincerely,
  Velin
  the Telerik team

  
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  Attached files

  • sample.zip

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• Judi Martini

  Posted on Jul 14, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi
  
  I also have a question about customization.
  
  On your demo under Chart, there is a Data Drill Down sample. I have adopted a similar view into my application but my chart is smaller and at the bottom right of my window. Therefore when I hover over the chart items placed closer to the bottom right of my window, the tooltip chart just kind of flashes the start of the animation over and over again and never displays properly.
  
  This behaviour can be reproduced by viewing your Chart/WPF/DrillDown if you take the following steps:
  
  1) Open the Chart/WPF/DrillDown under Chart section.
  2) Maximize your window.
  3) Click on the arrow at the bottom centre under the chart to remove the comments below.
  4) Hover over the very bottom of the last bar, close to the axis label and watch the tooltip chart flicker on and off.
  
  I know that on the demo this problems is trivial but in my application half of my chart displays this behaviour.
  
  Is there a workaround where I could set the tooltip to display on the other side if it's running out of screen?
  
  Thank you
  Judi

  Reply

• Giuseppe Giuseppe

  Posted on Jul 15, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi Judi Martini,
  
  Indeed we must admit this is a limitation within the RadChart tooltip implementation. Unfortunately we cannot suggest you a workaround for the time being, but we will do our best to improve the behavior for the official service pack release scheduled for the end of the month.
  
  
  Regards,
  Manuel
  the Telerik team

  
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