Generating Dynamic charts in Grails
In my project we need to generate dynamic Pie charts & Area charts. I had various options to do so.
1. Use Google charts API
2. Use Grails Eastwood Chart plugins.
3. Use jFreeChart API.
In case of Google charts, the application only generates the required URL & get the chart from google server , which is unacceptable if we are developing intranet application.
In case of Grails Eastwood Chart plugin, it is good when we talk about simple charts (as it generates them quickly with only single line of code), but it does not provide vast functionality & doesn’t have full control over the chart.
Like , in case of pie chart , it doesn’t provide Legends.
So, finally i used the JfreeChart API for our project. It is free Java chart library. JFreeChart supports pie charts (2D and 3D), bar charts (horizontal and vertical, regular and stacked), line charts, scatter plots, time series charts, high-low-open-close charts, candlestick plots, Gantt charts, combined plots, thermometers, dials and more.
For generating Charts in Jfree , just download the jfreechart-1.0.10.jar & jcommon-1.0.13.jar and place them in lib folder.
The list we are passing contains the labels(keys) & their values. Height and width are for size of chart.
void drawPieChart(List keys, List values, Integer width, Integer height) {
DefaultPieDataset pieDataset = new DefaultPieDataset();
keys.eachWithIndex {String data, Integer index ->
pieDataset.setValue(data, values[index]);
}
PiePlot3D plot = new PiePlot3D(pieDataset);
plot.setDirection(Rotation.CLOCKWISE)
plot.setStartAngle(90)
plot.setBackgroundPaint(Color.white)
plot.setLabelGenerator(new CustomLabelGenerator()) // this class is used for generation of customized labels
plot.setLabelOutlinePaint(Color.WHITE)
plot.setLabelFont(new Font("SansSerif", Font.PLAIN, 10))
JFreeChart chart = new JFreeChart(plot)
chart.setBorderVisible(false)
chart.setBackgroundPaint(Color.white)
chart.legend.setPosition(RectangleEdge.TOP)
final ChartRenderingInfo info = new ChartRenderingInfo(new StandardEntityCollection());
final File file1 = new File("//project/web-app/images/piechart.png");
ChartUtilities.saveChartAsPNG(file1, chart, width, height, info);
}
And the class used for generation of custom labels is:-
static class CustomLabelGenerator implements PieSectionLabelGenerator {
public String generateSectionLabel(final PieDataset dataset, final Comparable key) {
String temp = null
if (dataset != null) {
temp = dataset.getValue(key).toString() + "%"
}
return temp
}
It will generate the labels as percentage(%) values.
This method will generate the pie chart png image at the given path.
Useful links:-
http://jfree.org/
http://grails.org/plugin/eastwood-chart
Hope you find this useful.
Vishal
vishal@intelligrape.com
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Hi ,
My Problem is that I am using grails Weceem CMS Plugin .
I want to combine Jsecurity plugin with this weceem cms plugin.
how to do it ?
Please help me to find the solution.
Regards
DINESH T
Another options is to use
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If you are not against flash, then Open Flash Chart produces much more beautiful charts than JFreeCharts, and the server only has to send XML or JSON data to the browser. There is even a Grails plugin for that
Hey thanx…
flot looks nice…
i had even tried jQueryChart plugin, but left it due to HTML canvas tag
jFreeChart is nice and all, but incredible slow and cpu consuming. Have a look at http://code.google.com/p/flot/ if client side rendering is acceptable to your project.