Charts - which product?

[TJ53]

I need to add basic charts to one solution and I'm wondering if I should go for either xmcharts or fusioncharts. Any tips on this or any other options I should consider? Thanks!

[Fitch]

I've looked at both, but only a little. xmCHART has been around for some time, so that might be worth something. It puts the graph in a container field. FusionCharts for FileMaker looks really nice though, and has a free version. Its pricing even for the Pro version is not bad. Flash plugin is required, but that's something most people should have. It puts the result in a web viewer.

http://www.x2max.com/en/products/xmCHART/info.html

http://www.fusioncharts.com/FileMaker/

You say you need basic charts, though. You can actually can make bar charts fairly easily with CSS and the web viewer.

http://dhtmlsite.com/cssgraphs.php

You can also find a few old-school techniques here:

http://www.fmfiles.com/dev5.html

Not to mention:

http://www.briandunning.com/chartmaker/

[TJ53]

Thanks a lot Fitch, this is really useful info.

[MRH]

I've recently been playing around with amCharts that looks similar to FusionCharts,

http://www.amcharts.com

It's not built for FileMaker but for html using flash & xml settings files, so I've started to develop a solution that has a settings layout for all the parameters for the various chart types and then shows the desired chart/charts in a web viewer.

A work in progress, but looks promising.

Mark

[TJ53]

Thank you Mark. It looks like the trend is using the web viewer for generating charts ... with FM 9 they can actually be dinamically created (no need for script to update the graphic). Have a look at this example from Ray Cologon:

http://www.nightwing.com.au/FileMaker/demos9/demo901.html

I think xmcharts is a great product, but I wonder if it is to be extint in the web viewer era ...

[mr_vodka]

I guess I will chime in here. XM Charts have been great to use previously and still remains the most customizable for our Gnatt Charts. However, the Flash based charts are much nicer looking and are dynamic. XM Chart is not as asthetically appealing and its limitation is that a routine has to be rerun each time that you want to update the image (which itself is obivously another limitation with XM Chart).

As I previously stated, we are still using XM Chart for our Gnatt charts because I have not found any flash based solutions that can accommodate our needs. The example that FMI produced, is limted by a one year range. I am waiting for Fusion charts to have the Gnatt chart available to see if we could use that later down the road.

So to sum it up, I would use Flash based charts over XM Charts, however in some areas XM Chart still provides better needs than Flash charts.

My :twocents:

[JesseSFR]

You know what would be pretty interesting... If you could leverage the web viewer and it's data url's to make a suite of custom charting templates.

[Fitch]

One of the tips I picked up at DevCon is that flash-based / web viewer charts don't print as nicely as the plugin-based charts. It's a FileMaker bug: flash is vector format, so it should print at hi-res, but it doesn't. Something to keep in mind.

[TJ53]

That's definitely something to take into account. I wonder if it makes any difference printing after having saved as PDF, instead of printing directly from FM ... I guess not ... in any case, thank you for the great tip.

[mtpaper]

Hi - new to filemaker and will be needing a program to work with FM - printing charts.

Not for viewing on the web (maybe that's next!).

This is primarily for my husband - I've made the switch from Approach to FM, and trying to get him to switch too. But he needs charts.

Is xmCHART still the primary option?

Is fusioncharts.com for printing and web, or just web?

I'm on Mac

He's still on Windows (but will switch with 1-3 years)

Thank you!

Marion

[mr_vodka]

It really depends on what kind of charts you area looking for. XM Charts is still a good option, however with the introduction to the webviewer, you can now use a lot of the web based chart options now.

If its a simple bar chart, there are plently of free examples out there.

[JerrySalem]

I would like to put in my vote for GoogleCharts

FMWeb school has a free tool for creating charts using the Google API

http://www.fmwebschool.com/fmwebgoogle.zip

but you can build them yourself also by reading and playing with the google api. It isn't difficult but it is a bit different from FMP programming.

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

Of course, depending on what you actually want to accomplish this may or may not work for you.

Jerrry

[WilliamCB]

Did I miss something? The FMWebSchool download is a nice demo, but you can't actually see the calculation that does all the work. That is what would save everyone a lot of time...

[Lee Smith]

Yes you can.

Go into Layout Mode and you will see it in the Web Viewer.