Friday, September 4, 2009

Searching for .Net 2.0 Charting Control

I am looking for a good charting component compatible with ASP.NET 2.0. I have been comparing and trying various charting controls lately and maybe some of my findings could by also useful for you. I was looking for some control that supports transparent chart caching, saving to files and would easily integrate to existing Asp Net application.I'm looking for something that's capable of generating 2D charts right now, but 3D support would also be welcome. The control should be easy to use but also fully customizable (sounds like a sci-fi huh?).

I have decided not to include samples of generated graphs, as the post would be too long for a blog. There are direct links to example pages for everywhere it was possible.
.netCHARTING

.netCHARTING is a charting library with support for dozens of kinds of charts. Latest library version (3.4) fully supports ASP.NET 2.0 and supports 2D and 3D graphics, combo charts, splines, line graphs, stacked bars, horizontal bars, pie charts, financial charts, and many others. This control also contains automatic caching subsystem and is one of my favorites. .netCHARTING gallery
Telerik r.a.d.chart

Telerik's r.a.d.chart is specifically designed for ASP.NET charting and focuses on being an easy-to-use component for business reporting in Web applications. It comes together with full Visual Studio® .NET design-time support. Very nice features of this control is the ability to create image maps to facilitate drill-down charts. Telerik online demos
Xceed Chart for .NET

Xceed Chart comes with support for both Windows forms and Web forms controls to support charting in both environments. It uses OpenGL (3D and 2D) and GDI+ (2D) for fast-rendering charts, fill effects, and smooth chart elements, but it also means very fast, real-time rendering on most systems. This library also fully integrates with Visual Studio.
Dundas Chart for ASP.NET

Dundas Chart for ASP.NET is designed for use in ASP.NET applications and adds some features not found in the Windows Forms version, such as more versatile image support and animated flash charts. Dundas Chart for .NET Version 5.0 was designed specifically for Visual Studio 2005, and is seamlessly integrated into the development environment.

There are also some free .net charting components available. Though they did not meet my requirements, they could be very useful in some other project.
ZedGraph

ZedGraph is a set of classes, written in C#, for creating 2D line and bar graphs of arbitrary datasets. The classes provide a high degree of flexibility -- almost every aspect of the graph can be user-modified. At the same time, usage of the classes is kept simple by providing default values for all of the graph attributes. The classes include code for choosing appropriate scale ranges and step sizes based on the range of data values being plotted. ZedGraph is maintained as an open-source, is fully compatible with Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and looks very professional. ZedGraph also provider webcontrol interface, so it could easily be used from ASP.NET 2.0 applications. ZedGraph charting gallery
NPlot

NPlot (formerly known as scpl) is a free charting library for .NET. It boasts an elegant and flexible API. NPlot includes controls for Windows.Forms, ASP.NET and a class for creating Bitmaps. Library is accompanied by source code and is released under a BSD-style license. It supports chart types like bar charts, line graphs, and combo charts. Nplot chart examples
SasqChart

SasqChart supports Webforms (compiles also on ASP.NET 2.0), Winforms and rendering to a bitmap files. Its Free for all non commercial developers and it's available with full source code. Supported charts include Bar, Line, Area, Stacked Area and 2D Pie. SasqChart charting gallery

1 comment:

Todd Anglin said...

Let me also suggest- if you're looking for data visualization in ASP.NET- that you consider using Silverlight in ASP.NET. SL is much better at rich data visualization than ASP.NET, and used in combination, you can create a powerful web app. Here's an example I did some time ago showing you how you can actually use Telerik's Silverlight RadChart and then automatically "fall back" to the standard ASP.NET chart if Silverlight is not installed:

http://blogs.telerik.com/toddanglin/posts/09-05-21/gracefully_degrade_radchart_for_silverlight_in_asp_net.aspx

Hope that helps!
-Todd