Little Tricks on Download and Test Open Flash Chart
While finding a chart package for my project I noticed Open Flash Chart is very promising, so I decided to download it and try it out. Well, what’s good about Open Flash Chart? let’s see what the owner writes:
Open Flash Chart, is open source. It is free to use and you get the source code to fiddle with!
then How does it work?
- User browses to your web site.
- The browser downloads the web page which contains the Open Flash Chart.
- Open Flash Chart downloads the data file and displays the chart.
It sounds pretty easy, right? However, I had to spend quite sometime finding out the download link from Open Flash Chart’s homepage. I did try to click other links to see which one is going to take me to the download page, the page seems very sneaky though, and finally I clicked the one at the top right corner of the page which led me to the login page of sourceforge.net and I have to do a search from to get the very download page. I am sure some of you encountered the same issue as I did. Here I’d like to write down what I experienced so that my experience could benefit others.
First the homepage of Open Flash Chart is here, which actually is the documentation page. I guess you will have to stay there for a while to read and understand how Open Flash Chart works
Secondly, go to sourceforge.net to download the packge and follow the tutorial to install the package.
[Update at 07-09-08]: http://www.teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/download.php should work now!
The next thing you need to do is test it out before going further. I encounterd another problem here since I didn’t really follow the tutorial on creating the test page, I guess it’s my fault. Anyhow, here is what I encountered, I simply created “chart.php” and pasted the following code in the php assuming you put Open Flash Chart under your server’s root like Apache’s htdocs/open-flash-chart:
<?php
include_once 'php-ofc-library/open_flash_chart_object.php';
open_flash_chart_object( 500, 250, 'http://'. $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] .'/open-flash-chart/data-files/data-1.txt', false );
?>With this code only, your browser is totally blank, cuz flash really doesn’t like the HTML snippet generated by open_flash_chart_object, because it doesn’t contain HTML tags. I had to spend sometime to figure this out, so the fix is to have the following:
<html>
<body>
<?php
include_once 'php-ofc-library/open_flash_chart_object.php';
open_flash_chart_object( 500, 250, 'http://'. $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] .'/open-flash-chart/data-files/data-1.txt', false );
?>
</body>
</html>
Now you should see either a chart or a flash with a message similar to the following:
http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/xxx
If you don’t see anything, then you need to read the tutorial again to make sure you strictly follow it.
Note you may have to change above code to using either a single quote or double quote to follow PHP convention if the code doesn’t quite work
5 Comments »
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View Link
http://www.teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/download.php
What don’t you see on this page? It lists all the downloads for all the different versions?
Do you see an error or anything odd?
monk.e.boy
Comment by monk.e.boy | July 9, 2008 |
Hi Monk.e.boy
For some reasons when I looked the page, I only saw “Price:” without having anythnig contents following it, not like what I see now.
That’s why I put this page as a reminder. I even saw this happened to me on this monday
Comment by ikool | July 9, 2008 |
May you know another?
Comment by Amenajari interioare | August 4, 2008 |
Is there any tutorial how to build the OFC source using eclipse + Flex SDK
Thanks!
Comment by Wildan Maulana | February 15, 2009 |
Hello, Very nice site. Universe help us, dont worry man.
Comment by 3memhi | May 17, 2009 |