Data Visualization

Pie charts are similar to bar charts in the aspect that pie charts tend to visualize individual, disconnected points, rather than trends, such as lines or area charts. With a pie chart, the focus is on showing a part-of-a-whole relationship.

Getting Started

In order to take advantage of the functionality offered by the chart component, you will need to:

Bar charts are useful for displaying data that is classified into nominal or ordinal categories. Nominal data is categorised according to descriptive or qualitative information such as county of birth, or subject studied at university. Ordinal data are similar but the different categories can also be ranked, for example in a survey people may be asked to say whether they thought something was very poor, poor, fair, good or very good.

Area charts are similar to line charts in that they are used to track performance over a period of time. Line charts and area charts are very closely related. They are both good for time series data. They both show continuity and connectivity across a given dataset. They are both good for underlining trends rather than individual values.

Line charts are used to track performance over a period of time. It connects a series of points with straight lines. When working with line series, depending on the precise type of data in the underlying data source, one can choose either a standard line or a scatter. A line is preferred when the distribution of data over time is more even. A Scatter on the other hand, is the better choice when working with clusters of data, which would otherwise be harder to distinguish.

When choosing a data visualization tool, it is important to pick the right set. The Shield UI Chart component offers three distinct advantages. We will briefly look at these in the next paragraphs.

In an older blog entry, we looked at creating a sales dashboard application for ASP.NET. Today, we will briefly describe how to achieve the same setup in MVC. The complete sample is available for download at the bottom of the page.

To start off, we create a new Visual Studio 2012 MVC application, with .NET Framework 4.0. To be able to take advantage of the charting component, we add a reference to the Shield.Mvc.UI dll:

The folder structure of the application looks like this:

In this blog entry, we demonstrate how to create a Sales Dashboard application for ASP.NET. The complete code is available for download at the bottom of the page.

The finished sample looks like this:

To start off, we create a new Visual Studio project for web. The web application needs to contain a single .aspx file, which will host the related controls. The second step is to include the .dll files for the chart components to the project:

One of the valuable things that HTML5 conveys to developers is technology for doing rich visualizations directly in the browser. For years, web developers had to do one of the below mentioned scenarios if they want to present a visually rich element (for example a chart):

a. Conduct a round-trip to the server
The server fetches the needed image data and channels the results back to the browser. Works everywhere, but the results are usually static. Any changes to the image require more trips to the server.

In this article, we tackle a common data visualization task – creating a sales dashboard. A sales dashboard is widely used in business presentations, to outline key performance indicators for a given business process or objective. Key to any such presentation is the good visualization of the data, as well as a polished appearance. Naturally, each sales dashboard application is different and may vary greatly. The approach demonstrated in this article employs some of the most widely used components in such scenarios.

ShieldUI recently announced the addition of a new set of tools to its Web Development Suite. The company rolled out a set of twelve new controls, which aim to boost the component offering and complement the flagship of the suite – the chart and grid controls.