Creating Charts and Gauges in your Rollbase Application

Charts, graphs, gauges and other visual aides add flair to your application dashboards and help trends pop off the page. In this blog, we discuss creating charts and gauges for your Rollbase applications.

Nowadays, user experience should be a priority as you start building your applications. Components like charts, graphs and gauges are always good tools to represent your data, as they help to visualize trends and patterns for better and faster recognition than tabular or any other data format. Visual information also improves approachability, which may drive more users toward your application.

There are quite a few chart libraries available, like FusionCharts, Google Chart, Kendo UI Chart and D3. While most of these libraries are free and open source, some of them provide a paid version with additional features. With over 90 chart types, numerous reporting capabilities and thousands of attributes, FusionCharts gives you a broader set of capabilities when compared to other chart libraries. FusionCharts offers not just charts but dashboard widgets, gauges, Gantt charts, heatmaps and a whole series of interactive maps. Progress Kendo UI also provides you with a wide range of charts and gauges, but they don’t support 3D charts, which FusionCharts supports very well. Unlike many libraries, FusionCharts also provides data parsing through both JSON and XML. FusionCharts is highly compatible with older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 as well. All of these unique aspects are why it has become one of the preferred charting libraries out there.

Fortunately, Progress Rollbase provides you with access to both Kendo UI and FusionChart libraries—without additional fees.

Rollbase supports various types of gauges and charts that you can use in your application. You can easily create a Google chart or Fusion chart from Rollbase. Rollbase also enables you to create various angular gauges. These are Fusion gauges. For more details on how to create charts and gauges in Rollbase, check out our documentation. This enables you to make your dashboards and portal pages more informative and user friendly.

It is practically impossible to imagine any dashboard without graphs and charts. Though Rollbase supports most of the widely used charts and gauges, the platform is very flexible and enables you to add your own custom charts and gauges. You can write your custom code to create and initialize these visual components and add them to your application page. Based on the context in which you are going to use these charts and gauges, you can include the appropriate property or attribute into your chart definition. Please see this blog where we demonstrated how to add Kendo radial gauges via custom script. This enables you to play with the properties and configuration options that Kendo provides you.

You can also add Fusion charts and gauges to your application. FusionCharts library gives you a number of chart and gauge styles and also various properties to improve the cosmetics of these widgets.

             

To get started with writing your own custom code to create Fusion charts and gauges, please see this blog on how to create custom Fusion charts in Rollbase.