NetCharts Designer Specifications
NetCharts Designer Product Brochure
Demo: Creating a Basic Dashboard Page with NetCharts Designer
Products for Developers
NetCharts Visualization Architecture
"Management can see and determine why changes are occurring in the profitability of the business. We are very pleased with our investment."
NetCharts Designer Features
NetCharts Designer creates template files that describe data presentation elements. This may include any combination of templates for data connectivity, charts, tables, and pages. Each of these elements can be used standalone or as part of a larger application.
Easy Wizard-based Development and Management
NetCharts Designer leverages wizards for file import/export and data, chart, table, and page creation. And charts, tables, images, text blocks, and other page elements can be simply dragged and dropped anywhere on a page.
Plus, NetCharts Designer provides powerful, simple-to-use dialogs to configure drilldown operations between report or dashboard pages. These dialogs provide information about the target page and variables passed from source page.
Highly Customizable Data Visualization Templates
Specifcally, NetCharts Designer produces the following types of customizable data visualization templates:
- Chart Definition Language (CDL) templates. These chart templates describe the look and behavior of charts. The chart templates can be exported for runtime use within any of the NetCharts products or can be used to create static images.
In addition to presentation information, each template may include runtime variables, data references, and style references. CDL templates can be exported for use in any of the NetCharts brand products, including NetCharts Server, NetCharts Pro, and NetCharts Applets. - Page Layout (PGL) templates. PGL files are used to create pages for data presentation applications. They can be exported to JSP, ASP/.NET and PDF.
Each page can contain any combination of charts, tables, images, text, HTML form elements, downloadable data references and custom code segments. Drilldown behavior and variable passing can be controlled from the PGL template. PGL files can be exported for use with Java JSP, ASP/.NET or Cold Fusion environments. PGL files can also be used to generate PDF documents. - Table Definition (TBL) templates. Table templates define column and row styling for tabular (alphanumeric text-based) data.
- Named Data Set (NDS) templates. NDS files can be configured to request data from many different databases, XML sources, flat files, or custom/legacy systems. NDS files are used by data clients; for example, charts and tables that use runtime data.
Shared Styles Using CSS
NetCharts Designer utilizes Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) classes to create and reuse any number of font, layout, color, pattern, and numerical formatting styles. This provides for a consistent and easily maintainable presentation.
Import/ Export Utilities
NetCharts Designer's import utilities provide for the easy inclusion of external image, data, and other files. The export feature offers a simple process to move from development to production, or to just produce static images and PDF reports.
Plus, NetCharts Designer contains built-in data tools and extensible "hooks" to convert raw data into meaningful information. One or more built-in or custom data functions can be "chained" together in order to produce the appropriate output.
Real-time Development
The NetCharts Designer Preview Browser saves time by providing a continuously up-to-date view of current development. As changes are made to the data, chart, table, or page templates, the view automatically refreshes with the new information.
Powerful Analytics Library – Included
With v6.0, NetCharts Designer now includes a powerful library of analytic functions to provide real-time data calculations and statistical process controls. Users can apply sophisticated data transformations to raw or minimally processed data.
With more than 50 analytics functions, pre-built calculations and algorithms can be applied to data for rapid analysis and visualization. For example, a retail store manager could apply a Pareto function to register receipts to see a ranking of the most popular products in the store. And trend and forecasting lines can be applied to gauge future sales. Plus, pre-built Statistical Process Control (SPC) functions can determine if the store is meeting sales and/or quality expectations.
Examples of the analytic functions included with NetCharts Designer include:
- Bin Data
- Univariate Metrics
- Normal and Histogram Distributions
- Differentiation
- Integration
- Interpolation
- Moving Averages
- Bollinger Bands
- Financial Functions
- Regression Analysis
- Pareto Analysis
- SPC (Statistical Process Control) Analytics
- Fourier
- Track Order
- Stochastic Oscillator
- Surface Metrics
Client Data Binding
NetCharts Designer's Data Binding panel allows developers to quickly map data from any data source into the appropriate chart or table data client. User can select and preview the data source, and then "bind" specific rows and columns to chart or table elements.
Dynamic Variables
Dramatically cut development time by reducing the number of templates required for an application. Developers can create a single template, and then pass in different data or other customization parameters at runtime. Dyanamic Variables dynamically modify Named Data Set (NDS) data queries, chart templates, table templates, and even page elements.