how to chart this data?

[Daniel Sprague]

Need some direction on how to implement this. Any and all assistance is greatly appreciated!
Have a rather abstract business problem, but is huge in my company, so I’m translating it into something simpler to understand.
We’ve collected data on how much coffee people drink, on a daily basis, and need to chart it, showing how much they actually consumed compared to what they should have consumed.

The Data looks like this:

Person                  DateExamined  Budgeted Cups                 Actual Cups Consumed
Fred                       3/1/13                   2                                              1
Fred                       3/2/13                   2                                              4
Fred                       3/3/13                   2                                              2
Bob                        3/1/13                   3                                              5
Bob                        3/2/13                   3                                              4
Bob                        3/3/13                   3                                              5
Steve                    3/1/13                   1                                              1
Steve                    3/2/13                   1                                              0
Steve                    3/3/13                   1                                              0

So by looking at the data we can see how much coffee people actually drank, compared to what they were supposed (budgeted) to drink, on a daily basis.

In the RadChart, I need this charted with a Horizontal Line, with the dates being the x-axis labels.  The line series is the part I’m stumped on.  For the data above, the chart should show a total of 6 lines… more precisely, 3 “groups” of 2 lines… each of the 3 groups being 1 of the persons… the 2 lines being the budget and actual, so one can clearly see when people went over or under.

Thanks for all feedback on this.

[Missing User]

Hello Daniel,

You'll have to manually populate the data in the chart, since your problem has to be solved through grouping and RadChart doesn't currently offer such a feature. However, you can easily group your data using the GroupBy Linq extension method.

Suppose the data for a single person is stored in a business object defined as follows:

public class BudgetedVsActualConsumption
{
    public DateTime DateExamined { get; set; }
    public string Person { get; set; }
    public int BudgetedCups { get; set; }
    public int ActualCups { get; set; }
}

Assuming you have a single collection of BudgetedVsActualConsumption items populated with the sample data you posted, you need only follow this sample code snippet:

var groupedData = GetSampleData().GroupBy(bvac => bvac.Person);
foreach (var group in groupedData)
{
    ChartSeries seriesBudget = new ChartSeries() { Type = ChartSeriesType.Line };
    ChartSeries seriesConsumption = new ChartSeries() { Type = ChartSeriesType.Line };

    seriesBudget.Name = group.Key + " Budget";
    seriesConsumption.Name = group.Key + " Consumption";
    foreach (var item in group)
    {
        seriesBudget.Items.Add(new ChartSeriesItem { XValue = item.DateExamined.ToOADate(), YValue = item.BudgetedCups });
        seriesConsumption.Items.Add(new ChartSeriesItem { XValue = item.DateExamined.ToOADate(), YValue = item.ActualCups });
    }

    this.radChart.Series.Add(seriesBudget);
    this.radChart.Series.Add(seriesConsumption);
}

All the best,
Ivan N.
the Telerik team