Flash Chart Helper

I’ve been using the Flash Chart Helper recently and it’s been working really well once I got a couple of things ironed out with it.

I followed the instructions and copied all the files to the right place. I had the array created and sending what I thought was the correct format of data to be graphed but I was still getting errors. Originally I had this line:

echo $flashChart->begin(array('prototype'=>true));

at the top of my graph. When I removed the option array (because I wasn’t using prototype) it gave me a lovely graph.

Next thing was add labels to the X-axis. My data set was being sent in the following format:

Array ( 
[0] => Array ( 
    [day] => Monday 
    [hits] => 0 ) 
[1] => Array ( 
    [day] => Tuesday 
    [hits] => 15 ) 
[2] => Array ( 
    [day] => Wednesday 
    [hits] => 58 ) 
[3] => Array ( 
    [day] => Thursday 
    [hits] => 23 ) 
[4] => Array ( 
    [day] => Friday 
    [hits] => 23 ) 
[5] => Array ( 
    [day] => Saturday 
    [hits] => 99 ) 
[6] => Array ( 
    [day] => Sunday 
    [hits] => 34 
) )

So I set up

echo $flashChart->setData($logs, '{n}.hits', '{n}.day', 'byDay');
echo $flashChart->axis('x', array('labels' => $logs));

To explain that, $logs is the array of data, {n}.hits is the data to be graphed, {n}.day is the label path, byDay is the name of the graph. The options for the axis are simply the array to pass in to read the labels from.

I then wanted the labels to be vertical so that they wouldn’t overlap. This proved to be a harder thing to fix. In the API on page three of the helper article, it only mentions

axis($axis, $options = array())

I added in the option of

'vertical' => true

but I got an error that the helper couldn’t find the set_vertical() function. After some digging around in the source, I found that the real way to pass label options was as a third variable to the axis function. So I edited my call to read

echo $flashChart->axis('x', array('labels' => $logs), array('vertical' => true);

and lo and behold, vertical labels!