Ziya plugin - Charting the rails...

rubyonrails-talk
1

Nice plugin, drop dead ugly logo for your site :slight_smile:

2

Ha !! Thanks. If you would like to contribute a nice logo we'll be happy to oblige...

3

Take a look at SWF/XML Charts ( http://www.maani.us/xml_charts/ ) to get more info on how the charts are constructed. The answer is "sort of": the Flash chart component reads the XML data when it is rendered on the screen (the URL to the XML appears in the HTML which embeds the Flash object).

I am glad to see this plugin released as it means there is one less thing I have to maintain in my code base. :slight_smile:

V/r Anthony

4

Thanks !!

We have tried to list the ZiYa plugin in most sites we knew off. If you have suggestions about other sites, we could list on that would be great.

Indeed ZiYa leverages XML/SWF Charts but hides the XML generation part from the developer. Within a couple of API calls you should be able to have a chart rendered in you web app. For instance in you controller you can do something like this:

    def sales        chart = Ziya::Charts::Bar.new        chart.add(:axis_category_text, %w{ 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 })        chart.add(:series, "Sales", [ 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 ])        render :text => chart     end

   Then in your view code:

    <%= gen_chart( "sales_chart",                    url_for( :controller => 'my_controller', :action => 'sales' ),                    "#ffffff", 400, 300 ) %>

   We've also leveraged YAML and ERB to enable you to style the chart just like    you would for HTML and stylesheets. The cool thing here ( so we think... ) is    that you can dynamically style your charts based on some model state.    For example, if you want a certain aspect of the chart to change color based    on some threshold, you could override the style sheet with something like this:

   <%=comp :series_color%>       <%if @options[:sales] > 10%>           colors: ff0000,aa0000       <%else%>           colors: 0000bb,00cc00       <%end%>

     If this looks less than ideal you can also define a ZiYa helper function which would render      the code above as such:

    <%=comp :series_color%>         <%= custom_colors @options[:sales]%>

   There is more info about that in the rdocs. LiquidRail.com is for sale | HugeDomains.        Thanks for checking us out !!

-Fernand