RadHtmlChart began as a rather simple ASP.NET AJAX charting control with a lot of promises and expectations to fulfill. I do believe it has done a marvelous job so far and this is one of the reasons why I wanted to match its feature set to the one of the older and more mature charting control the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX suite offers – RadChart. The other reason is that the previous comparison is, obviously, hopelessly outdated :). Right below you will find several tables that compare the main areas of the two charting controls – main concepts, different chart types, axis configuration and more.

Types of series

I decided to have the available chart types in a separate section, because most of the features below will apply to any of them. Also, because a short text introduction may help rest your eyes for all the tabular data. Hey, I didn’t say it was going to be short; we have been working really hard this past year to deliver all this functionality :)

Feature comparison

Let’s get down to business. Scroll down and examine the tables I prepared for you. If the short explanations in the first column are not sufficient – most of the rows have links to back my words up in the second and third column. Dig in!

* If you are wondering what “can be done” means – some additional code needs to be written in order to get the given effect/functionality

* sparkline charts are more like a set of configurations for the chart – no axes or labels, smaller size. RadHtmlChart will make them for you with just one property
** I would advise grouping the datasource itself anyway, before passing it to the chart

* positions can be chosen (e.g. bottom, left, right, top), but exact numbers like left=20px cannot be used
** for line series – line width and color, the line type cannot be changed (e.g. to dots, dashes)
*** only their appearance, the legend contents are generated from the series collection
**** only for bar series

* for a databound RadHtmlChart the powerful ClientTemplates can be used
** there simply is no such thing as a line break in SVG text elements

* only one
** limited, requires custom code
*** only the y-axis

Things that happened recently

Go through the following post from my colleague Stamo on the change in the way series items are created in RadHtmlChart programmatically, in case you missed it. A lot of work has been put into this control to help our new recruit measure up with the veterans.

What is next

You may have spotted a couple of rows read “October 2013” for RadHtmlChart. This comes to say that these features are nearly complete and they will definitely make it in the next major release.

If you want to see something else implemented – drop us a line below or post in our Feedback Portal.

Don’t forget to play around with the RadHtmlChart online demos and go through its online documentation, because there is a lot more information there than I can possibly squeeze into this post.