Beautiful Flash Charts for Pentaho

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.

24 thoughts on “Beautiful Flash Charts for Pentaho

  1. Harris

    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! ๐Ÿ˜‰

    All the best, Harris

    Reply
  2. monk.e.boy

    Thanks for the link love ๐Ÿ™‚

    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

    Reply
  3. Usha

    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

    Reply
  4. Fly

    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?

    Reply
  5. Winston

    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.

    Reply
  6. Winston

    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.

    Reply
  7. shiju

    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

    Reply
  8. Ragu

    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

    Reply
  9. Jaibabu

    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

    Reply
  10. Ramesh

    Hi,
    Can any one say how to use timeseries collector for two columns on y axis using pentaho.

    thank u so much for helping

    Thanks
    Ramesh

    Reply
  11. Renato

    Hi all,
    i download Nickโ€™s piechart example and iโ€™m able to chang the SQLQuery to load my data and start it. Now i want pass the query parameter on runtime by a filter. I try but the chart always load the default input param. I try with a filter panel the set session param, the same value i try to load in my query.
    Can you hel me?
    Thanks

    Reply
  12. Danelis

    Hello I need help, want to create graphs with Open Fash Chart for pentaho. That is the first thing that I must do.

    Reply
  13. Antonette

    Please help me to integrate the Open Flash fro Pentaho. How would I do it if I need to use higher values like miliion or ten million? If my values are dynamic, is it possible not to mention these values?

    Reply
  14. Rado

    Hi,
    I’ve problem to display data with values less than 1 (all of them are from interval 0 – 1). The “0” on the Y scale jumps to the top of the chart and nothing except x and y axes is displayed.
    Is it bug or I’m doing something wrong? (Using Pentaho 3.6.0 EE).
    Regards,
    Rado.

    Reply
  15. sunny

    great job…. hey i would like to know to how to make these flash chart reactive to mouse clicks using metalayer concept(i.e having component definition in some separate javascript file)…

    Regards,
    Sunny

    Reply
  16. Bily

    Hi,

    I’m trying to add a link to each bar in a bar chart. Each link has unique id appended the end of the link to use it as a drill down chart. I can assign a link to ALL of them but not add a unique value. Can anyone help me out?

    Thanks,

    Billy

    Reply

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