Thursday, April 28, 2011

FusionCharts Rocks!!!

Been working on a PoC integrating FusionCharts with Cognos and I have to say, FusionCharts really look amazing. With these charts so many of the limitations that we come across using Cognos charts can be overcome. There are some awesome charts/widgets out there like funnel charts that are still not available with Cognos 10.

With FusionCharts, you can even have charts that scroll thus not compromising on the amount of data displayed along the x axis nor the look and feel. There are so may properties that can be set for the chart too. And I think with this you can set a lot of values dynamically like dynamic trend line values. Really cool. But I think the drill through functionality might be a little lacking when we try using this through Cognos. FusionCharts does have a linked report concept that I am hoping is similar to drill through functionality but need to check it out.

PaulM's contribution:
The drill through (clickURL) functionality works perfectly. You can even perform a self drill through to mimic a drilldown.

The trick is to use repeaters not repeater tables or lists with HTML items. Lists and repeater tables insert useless table and cell tags. Text items are wrapped in spans.

There are two ways of embedding the data directly into the graph.

1. You can use the setDataXML() function.

2. You can also use the HTML embedding method detailed here: http://www.fusioncharts.com/docs/FirstChart/HtmlEmbed.html
 

9 comments:

Nick Waters said...

Very interesting !...how do you integrate Fusion Charts (I presume they are consuming XML as a source of data ?) with Cognos ?.
Do you have any examples that you can share ?
Regards
Nick

Zephyr said...

FusionCharts use either XML or JSon as data sources. I came across this great article while searching if anyone out there has integrated FusionCharts with Cognos before:

http://www.subodhchauhan.com/archives/23

But unlike the above article where the XML data is static in my case I want to consume on-demand data. So I am trying to use CMS to go that route. Let me know if you would like more info on this.

CognosPaul said...

Integrating Fusion Charts into Cognos is not difficult at all. I've done it at a few clients who have all been extremely happy with the results.

The drill through (clickURL) functionality works perfectly. You can even perform a self drill through to mimic a drilldown.

The trick is to use repeaters not repeater tables or lists with HTML items. Lists and repeater tables insert useless table and cell tags. Text items are wrapped in spans.

There are two ways of embedding the data directly into the graph. 1. You can use the setDataXML() function.
2. You can also use the HTML embedding method detailed here: http://www.fusioncharts.com/docs/FirstChart/HtmlEmbed.html

I personally prefer the HTML embedded method.

I'll see if I can dig out an old demo I created with the free version.

Zephyr said...

Thats good to know Paul. Thanks for sharing this information. I will add this to the article.

Do you know if this integration works with Cognos 10? Does Cognos 10 support flash based reporting? Because I have been hearing differing comments on that and have been unable to find any document that says so nor do I have access to Cognos 10 to try this out.

Any light that you can throw on the above would definitely help.

Anthony Jaraza said...

Hello Paul,

I am interested in the Cognos-Fusionchart integration you did especially on embedding the Cognos data directly into the chart.

CognosPaul said...

Sorry for the delay in replying - I'm preparing a document detailing how to embed the fusion charts

CognosPaul said...

A bit later than I intended.

here is the article I promised.

Zephyr said...

Thanks Paul.

Krishna Kishore Kommana said...

Here you go..

http://krishnakommana.blogspot.com/