TomMancine

We developed a portion of our application last summer using FusionCharts v3.1. Recently, our users have gradually been updating to Flash plugin v10.1 and are starting to report problems with our charting pages. In several places in our application, we are dynamically redrawing charts in response to user inputs (for example, dragging a slider). This is accomplished with the setDataXml method. Users with Flash plugin v10.0.x see the graph continuously redraw with the new values in a relatively responsive way. However, users with Flash plugin v10.1.x see the graph flickering very badly. We did have flickering problems before when plotting large amounts of data; however, in this case, it flickers with the background color, and the flickering is pronounced even with only a few points. Before, it would flicker white, because of the "Reading XML Data" message, and only if there were a large amount of data. Since v10.1 introduced hardware acceleration, we suspected that might be the problem. However, when we forced the chart to render with wmode="opaque," which according to http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1_hardware_acceleration_04.html will force the player to use software rendering, the problem persisted. Is FusionCharts aware of any problems related to redraw performance in Flash 10.1, and are there any workarounds or plans to address this with a patch? It is causing some serious perception problems for our product.

Hi. I'm trying to use server-side export from FusionCharts v3. I have read the documentation carefully, and am using the following export-related parameters: exportHandler: the URL of my sample page exportEnabled: 1 exportAtClient: 0 exportAction: 'save' I have tried specifying a value for the exportCallback parameter, but it doesn't seem to work; my callback is never invoked. Additionally, the default callback (FC_Exported) does not seem to be getting fired, whether or not I remove my exportCallback parameter from the chart. Finally, when I sniff the POST to the server with Fiddler, I see exportCallback=undefined in the pipe-delimited list of parameters being posted. This does not seem to bode well. Note that when I create my chart, I am making sure that registerWithJS is set to '1', so that is not the source of the problem. Any ideas why my callback isn't firing? Even if there were some sort of problem on the server side, it seems to me that my callback should still be executed, with error codes to indicate that something has gone wrong. -Tom Mancine

It has been a while since we have heard anything on this issue. After applying the recent updates to Adobe's Flash player, our pages continue to exhibit this behavior. Additionally, we have downloaded the 3.2 version of FusionCharts and are still seeing the same problem, regardless of whether we send XML data or JSON data (although the flickering is gone in pure JS mode, it's not quite speedy or pretty enough for our application). We are wondering if any further progress has been made on this issue!

Thanks for the reply, and for looking into our issue. Just wanted to make sure it was on the radar somewhere! I'll be keeping an eye out for updates, but I understand it will take time because of the number of factors.

Any other information I can provide that would be helpful? Haven't heard anything on this issue in about a week.

Thanks again for the replies and for continuing to work with us on this issue. It's reassuring to know this is something you guys are aware of! I am interested to learn that it behaves differently in MacOS, and I wonder about how Firefox vs. IE affects that, but regrettably, as our application is consumed by large institutional customers, we are stuck with IE / Windows at the moment. We have been using data-xml simply because that's the only method that suits our needs (round-tripping to the server would take too long) but it's good to know that it's also the faster of the two We are already using wmode=windowed by default because of the better redraw performance--when we use opaque, we see the white "Reading XML" message flicker in, although that's different from the background flicker we see in flash 10.1. Contrary to what we would expect, we've been seeing the worst flicker on our newer machines, and we've seen it on small charts (80 x 80 pies) as well as large charts (300 x 150 xy charts). I am attaching an example (fcsample.zip) that demonstrates the flicker effect that is seen in our application. Regrettably, because our customer data is proprietary, and because our application uses a proprietary (in-house) wrapper around FusionCharts, I am unable to include our actual pages or anything like the data we are displaying. However, this sample does exhibit the same flickering behavior that our other pages do. I realize that updating the chart this frequently may not be a common use case, but it has been working very smoothly for us on machines which have the older version of the plugin, and I think it is a real credit to the product that we are able to use it for this purpose. Edited to add: The sample should be useful because I am confident that in situations where the sample flickers, our application will too. This sample has been tested and shown to exhibit flicker with v10.1.x of Flash in both IE6 and IE8. Feel free to do whatever you want with it, as to my knowledge it contains no proprietary work products. Thanks again for your attention, and hoping that this example proves helpful. -Tom fcsample.zip

Thank you for the reply! Although our implementation uses a slider as well, it updates the charts in a more continuous fashion, where your implementation moves in three discrete steps. In your example, most of the time when it repaints, there is an apparent flicker, both in the old and new versions of the flash plugin (that is, in v10.0.x and v10.1.x). However every so often it repaints without any visible flicker, which is the behavior we saw from our current version of FusionCharts with v10.0.x flash plugins. Unfortunately, our use of proprietary customer data in our product means that I cannot give you a login. Would it be useful if I assembled a cut-down version of our page that demonstrates the issue?

I'm afraid I may have confused the issue with additional information, but what the chart was intended to show was that, regardless of browser version, the issue occurs when the version of the flash plugin is 10.1 or higher. So that includes IE6 and IE8 both (and I imagine IE7 as well, but we don't have any test machines around with that browser). Thanks for following up with me and looking forward to any suggestions!

I am sorry to report that for us, the problem persists using the latest available version of the Flash plugin, v10.1.82.76. To expand, we have observed the following on our test machines: Browser OS Plugin Version Flickering Problem ------- -- -------------- ------------------ IE8 Windows XP 10.0.32.18 N IE8 Windows XP 10.0.42.34 N IE6 Windows XP 10.1.53.64 Y IE6 Windows XP 10.0.42.34 N IE6 Windows XP 10.1.82.76 Y

I am attempting to use FusionCharts for a new feature in our application; unfortunately, the chart will occasionally fail to render, for reasons which are not clear to us. I am enclosing several files. The file correct.png shows how the chart is expected to render, and most of the time does. Randomly, maybe one in five times, it renders incorrectly, as shown by bugged.png. In both cases, I have verified that we are sending it identical XML data, as provided in chartxml.xml (also attached). Finally, I have verified that the HTML being used to display the chart is in both cases identical; it is provided in objecttag.txt. Since we are creating the object in the same way and giving it the same input each time, I can only conclude that the failure to render correctly is occurring within the component. Worse, subscribing to the API methods listed in the documentation (FC_DataLoadError, FC_NoDataToDisplay, FC_DataXMLInvalid) does not give me a way to detect this error; nothing fires these methods even when the chart fails to load correctly (if I knew that, I could at least attempt to redraw it). I need to know a) if there is some error in how we're creating the chart that causes the error, if not, whether there is a way to prevent the error, c) if there are any known workarounds, d) if there is any way to detect that this error has occurred, e) if none of the above, how soon this issue will be addressed. Everyone here is pleased with FusionCharts' appearance and ease of use, but the random failure to draw correctly is causing big problems with acceptance. We are honestly considering scrapping the prototype and using another product if we can't fix it somehow, so your prompt attention is appreciated. This behavior is occurring for me in Internet Explorer. I see it in IE8 with IE7 compatibility mode enabled. Our VP is seeing it in regular IE7, and I'll be trying to reproduce it in IE6 later today. The version of Flash installed on all these machines is Flash 10. I have used the debug window (when the chart renders correctly) to confirm that I am running v3.1.1, which I believe is the most recent version. When the chart renders incorrectly, the debug window is not available. I was following the issue at http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic13006-6-1.aspx which appears to be the same problem, but the only proposed resolution is upgrading to the version of the product I am already running. This seems to be an old issue, because http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic2530-6-1.aspx http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic3131-6-1.aspx http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic5914-6-1.aspx http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic3059-6-1.aspx http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic3274-6-1.aspx http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic3399-6-1.aspx http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic1806-6-1.aspx http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic3172-6-1.aspx http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic1260-6-1.aspx http://www.fusioncharts.com/forum/Topic1093-6-1.aspx are the same thing. Looking at suggestions from those issues, I can add that I am using the provided JS to embed the chart, and that I am specifying a width in pixels and not in percent. I am also confident that the page has finished rendering by the time that I am working on the chart, as I am dynamically creating the chart in response to a user selecting an item from a drop-down list. The pages are being served up by IIS5.1 and 6.0, as we have an ASP.Net solution that is being developed on WinXP and deployed to Win2003 servers. Although there are sometimes issues related to use of '%' as numberPrefix, I can also verify that the problem still occurs when i replace % with %25 as my suffix. -Tom Mancine chartxml.xml objecttag.txt

Hello, Our product uses FusionCharts v3 to update interactively as the user modifies controls on the screen. If a client is on a slow enough machine, they occasionally see the chart flicker white, because when we call setDataXML(...), the chart momentarily repaints with the message "Reading Data. Please Wait" Is there any way to suppress this behavior, and have it simply repaint when the data is done parsing, rather than displaying notifications? In our case, we'd rather have the stale data stick around for an extra tenth of a second than to have the white flashing behavior. I've read the documentation without finding the appropriate property, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there is one that I missed Thanks, Tom Mancine

Hi. We're using the DragLine chart from PowerCharts v3. Recently, we made some modifications to our chart that caused us to set yAxisMaxValue in addition to yAxisMinValue. When this change was made, all of our horizontal div lines, axes hash marks, and bands on the chart area disappeared (chart.png). If the points are moved sufficiently to cause the chart to rescale PAST the yAxisMaxValue that we specified, the horizontal div lines, axes hash marks, and bands on the chart area reappear (chart2.png). It doesn't seem to me like specifying yAxisMinValue and yAxisMaxValue should cause these features to disappear. Is this a bug, and if so, is there a workaround that I can use? I'm attaching screenshots and the output from the debug window at the initial load of the chart. I believe that the errors related to number formats are due to the tags that we use to make our second series begin at the end of the first series (moving left to right across the chart). They should not impact the banding or axes. -Tom Mancine debug_output.txt

Setting adjustDiv='0' seemed to work for us. Thank you! -Tom

Hi, What additional information do I need to provide in order to get a response on this issue? This is threatening our release schedule, so I'd appreciate at least an acknowledgment or some suggestions. Thanks, Tom Mancine

The response from the server is currently an HTTP/405 because I haven't pointed it at a valid handler yet. I had been assuming that since the result object contained success/failure information, it would recover gracefully from a failed request and fire the callback with a status indicating that the post had failed. If that's not the case, I can continue implementing the handler (we need a slightly different behavior--we want the files placed in the ASP.Net session instead of on the filesystem) and hope that the callback will fire after that's done, but it seems like a long way to go without knowing that the callback will fire. -Tom Mancine

Hi, I'm trying to remove the y-axis labels from a DragLine chart in our product. Unfortunately, specifiying "showYAxisValues='0'" as part of the tag (like we do on Line2D, Scatter, etc) does not seem to work. After consulting the documentation, this doesn't seem to be an attribute that the DragLine chart recognizes. Is there another similar attribute that I can use or any workaround that produces a similar effect? -Tom Mancine

Hello. I'm trying to use the plotSpacePercent property to increase the spacing between bars in a Bar2D chart. I have successfully used this property to increase the spacing between bars in a Column2D chart. Unfortunately, increasing the plotSpacePercent property on a Bar2D chart seems to only increase the space above and below the bars, and they remain right next to one another, even when I pick an extreme value like 80% (they are all squeezed tightly together in the middle 20% of the chart!). If someone could tell me whether this is a known issue, or whether I'm just doing something wrong that I can't see, I'd really appreciate it. And if it is a known issue, it'd be nice to get a timetable on the fix so that I can tell my boss! Here is the XML I am generating: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <chart borderThickness="0" canvasBorderThickness="1" showBorder="0" bgColor="f1f5fb" bgAlpha="100" defaultAnimation="1" alternateHGridColor="CCCCCC" alternateHGridAlpha="20" divLineColor="888888" divLineAlpha="50" baseFontColor="666666" showLabels="1" showValues="0" decimals="2" showLegend="0" rotateLabels="0" showYAxisValues="0" yAxisMaxValue="3" caption="Marginal ROI" debug="1" useRoundEdges="1" plotSpacePercent="20" > <trendLines> <line startValue="1" color="888888" displayValue="$1/$ (Break even)" thickness="2" /> </trendLines> <categories> <category label="" /> </categories> <dataset color="#957CCE"> <set value="5.597108491501471" /> </dataset> <dataset color="#ED7C40"> <set value="5" /> </dataset> <dataset color="#64AD9C"> <set value="5" /> </dataset> <dataset color="#EABB45"> <set value="5.019340681236006" /> </dataset> <dataset color="#4E7AC2"> <set value="5.008364034539923" /> </dataset> <dataset color="#56C750"> <set value="32.714110752297515" /> </dataset> <dataset color="#B5B649"> <set value="5.005023160360537" /> </dataset> <dataset color="#DF91E1"> <set value="5" /> </dataset> <dataset color="#7BC9CE"> <set value="5" /> </dataset> <styles> <definition> <style name="CaptionFont" type="font" size="18" Color="365277" /> <style name="MyShadow" type="Shadow" alpha="30" /> </definition> <application> <apply toObject="CAPTION" styles="CaptionFont" /> <apply toObject="DATAPLOT" styles="MyShadow" /> <apply toObject="CANVAS" styles="MyShadow" /> </application> </styles> </chart>

This solution does seem to work with the Bar2D chart. I should have specified more precisely that I was trying to get it to work with the MSBar2D chart. Is there a way to get plotSpacePercent to work correctly using the MSBar2D instead of the Bar2D? Thanks again, Tom Mancine

I'm not sure if you have a feature request area, but our use of your product could definitely benefit from this feature as well. It makes no sense that automatic grid lines are available on some charts but not others--surely the code to implement a numVDivLine on a scatter plot can't be that different from on, say, an Area2D.

I'm trying to develop a screen in our application showing a table of values and a DragLine graph visualizing that data. I would like to know: 1. Can I register a javascript callback to be fired when a point is dragged and dropped? Previous forum comments make it seem like this is not the case, but they are several months old. Is this functionality now present, or planned for a future release? 2. Is there an option that can be set to display the value label of a given point as it is being dragged? In the absence of (1) I need a way to provide my users with some feedback about the value of the point they are selecting. 3. Even when using the formAction property, it appears that the form submit only occurs when clicking the button (verified using Fiddler). Does the swf perform any action (Javascript callback, form submission) that can be observed externally when a point is dragged? Can I tell the DragLine graph to submit after points are dragged instead of when the button is clicked? I am using a fully-licensed copy of PowerCharts v3, if that helps with any of the answers. Thanks, Tom Mancine

Thank you for the reply, and for considering our feature requests for inclusion in your product. I am pleased to say that the getChartFromId method is sufficiently speedy for our purposes that we are able to poll several times a second to check for modifications with minimal impact on the CPU usage of customers' browsers; however, if some sort of event subscription becomes available, we would definitely be interested. Similarly, the ability to display a label next to the point being dragged is currently something we can live without, but would definitely be interested in if it became available in the future.

The yAxisMinValue behavior seems broken to me. When I specify a yAxisMinValue for a chart, it seems like the actual minimum value for the axis is the minimum of ( yAxisMinValue , [smallest y-coordinate provided in my chart] ). Has anyone found a workaround for this problem? The current behavior is very frustrating.

Thank you for the reply! I understand the proposed solution, but as shown in your screenshot, that has the unfortunate side effect of making some of the arcs appear to "hang in the air" because the first segment, which would cross the axis, is not drawn, since one of its endpoints is now null. I believe that I could use linear interpolation to introduce extra points in my dataset precisely at y=0 to complete the arcs, but as this is a rather cumbersome solution, I was hoping that there was another approach.

All I mean by independent x-axis is that I'd like to find a way to do an area chart where I can specify the x- and y-coordinate of each point. The Line and Area charts have a fixed x-axis, where each new point increments by a fixed amount, and you are only free to specify the y-coordinate (eg <set value="..."/> ). To get a line-chart equivalent where the x-axis is independent, you actually do an xy scatter and set the drawLine attribute; however there is no corresponding drawFill attribute to make it look like an area plot. Please let me know if this explanation is still not clear enough I suspected this was the case, but figured it didn't hurt to ask. Fortunately this is not a deal-breaker for us!

I have found various forum postings explaining how to use drawLine to simulate line charts with an independent x-axis (so that I can specify something like (1,1), (2, 2), (10,10) and get a straight line). This will probably be adequate for what we're trying to do, but what we'd like is to have an AREA chart with an independent x-axis. Since I don't see any similar property like fillSeries or what have you on the dataset tag, I was wondering if there was any other way to accomplish this effect. Additionally, I was wondering if there was any way to get smoothing on the drawLine, so that if I'm approximating a curve, I don't need to construct an XML series with a large number of elements, as I'd think the fewer points I plot, the faster the chart will be. Thanks!