Home > Uncategorized > Beautiful Flash Charts for Pentaho

Beautiful Flash Charts for Pentaho

June 11th, 2008

I’ve worked on several customer dashboards and found the charting in Pentaho to be pretty good in a lot of circumstances, but lacking for a lot of circumstances. In particular, certain shading, animations, etc aren’t supported in Pentaho charts (based on JFreeChart).

There are a bunch of Flash charting libraries, and I recently worked with a customer that was using “Open Flash Charts.” I helped them get Mondrian data streaming through to this flash charting engine. I was surprised to find that the library is open source, and is moving to LGPL (away from GPL) to ensure that people feel comfortable embedding it in their applications.

I started integrating these charting capabilities with Pentaho to see how the charts look. I was seeing some really great results. The integration was done via a fair amount of fancy Javascript/Xaction sequence stuff but this integration did not require any custom Java application work. Just Pentaho .xactions and the basic open-flash-chart.swf. I might start looking at building a small little JSP library to help with some of this.

The first one I built was a little pie chart, that has a nice animation (copied and pasted here without the dynamic .xaction stuff)

The second one I built was this beautiful bar chart, comparing actuals and budgets.

In all cases, if you’re needing some “more” from Pentaho in terms of data visualization, don’t hesitate to be in touch. This flash chart is the latest in a series of dashboards that Bayon has been building for customers.

UPDATE: I built another one for a new customer, and changed the data labels for presentation here. Having a grand time with open flash chart. This chart below is the output of an MDX query to Mondrian. The one is the metric ( a base measure ) the other is a running total.

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  1. Harris
    June 12th, 2008 at 02:33 | #1

    Hey Nick!

    Thomas (also know as bugg_tb) has just informed me in ##pentaho about you getting this working!. Congrats man! I tried to to the same thing about a couple of months ago but only got as far as generating the charts in the format of .jsps.

    Two things i have to ask though…

    1. How did you get around the Data part? Did you actually link to a datasource or use the datafile technique?

    2. Why didn’t you show your readers the Sketch chart! ;)

    All the best, Harris

  2. honn45
    June 15th, 2008 at 22:14 | #2

    hey guys,Want to draw some cool Flash Charts then chk this out visifire

  3. June 17th, 2008 at 09:29 | #3

    Thanks for the link love :-)

    Version 2 or open flash chart uses JSON as the data format, this means the chart can talk to javascript real nice.

    Hope that may make AJAX stuff easier too.

    Cheers,

    monk.e.boy

  4. June 17th, 2008 at 09:46 | #4

    added a link, since I didn’t.

    I’ll check out the new JSON

  5. December 5th, 2008 at 05:34 | #5

    If you stumbled across these nice charts but are a php, or even better, CakePHP user, an implementation helper for the OFC-2 charts may be found here http://code.google.com/p/alkemann/

  6. Usha
    December 14th, 2008 at 23:22 | #6

    Hi,
    We have created few flash charts so im trying to drill down from the chart to jpivot Analysis view .My problem is im unable to fetch and pass the parameter. Can you please give me suggestions or any sample on Drill down in flash charts.

    Thanks & Regards
    Usha

  7. December 31st, 2008 at 03:51 | #7

    Hi,

    how to integrate with pentaho.

    Thanks
    mohan

  8. Fly
    January 13th, 2009 at 18:11 | #8

    Does anybody know how to have the values always turned on of, let’s say, bars from a bar chart so that one doesn’t have to mouse over the bars?

  9. priya
    February 20th, 2009 at 22:35 | #9

    Hai,
    can u tell me how draw charts by pentaho dash boards,by getting the data from the database

  10. Winston
    March 31st, 2009 at 16:08 | #10

    I have integrated the Open Falsh chart fro pentaho 2.0 and it is working well. I had 1 question regarding the steps and max values that are mentioned in the .txt files. for example in the ofc_bar_chart_3D.txt it requires the values for

    1000000

    10000000

    Is it possible not to mention these values as in my case the values can be dynamic , so i want the chart to relatively grow depending on the values it gets.

  11. Winston
    March 31st, 2009 at 16:09 | #11

    I have integrated the Open Falsh chart fro pentaho 2.0 and it is working well. I had 1 question regarding the steps and max values that are mentioned in the .txt files. for example in the ofc_bar_chart_3D.txt it requires the values for

    y-steps
    1000000
    y-steps
    y-max 10000000y-max

    Is it possible not to mention these values as in my case the values can be dynamic , so i want the chart to relatively grow depending on the values it gets.

  12. Dima
    April 14th, 2009 at 02:03 | #12

    amazing work :)
    I’m also trying to integrate flash chart with Pentaho
    wish someone can help me.

    Thanks..

  13. shiju
    April 17th, 2009 at 05:24 | #13

    Hi,
    its good work.. i am also trying to implement the code in the server 1.6. but not getting result. So can any body tell which version on wards the system support flash chart.
    can anybody give berif explanation

    Thanks
    shiju

  14. Ragu
    May 22nd, 2009 at 02:46 | #14

    Hi Congrats, for your good work…

    And i want to generate the dashboards, i am already implemented with old format charts, i want to upgrade it to Flash based charts. If any one likes, please helps me to achieve it. I have my own database, even my old application is running in Penatho 1.6 OGA….
    Thanks in advance

    Cheers,
    ragu

  15. Jaibabu
    June 2nd, 2009 at 02:37 | #15

    Hi,

    Is it possible to use OLAP Cube data to populate the chart, and can we able to rotate the chart. If yes please provide the demo and sample code.

    Thanks

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