Graphical Web Reports

[SharkAttack]

I need to emulate an Excel report someone does each month onto our Intranet web reports (which are all asp).

How the hell can you do that? Is there such a thing as a graph plugin? I seriously haven't got a clue on this area of reporting. My web reports have always been pure data.

If anyone could at least just point me in the right direction that'd be cool.

[Ish]

There's a couple of ways really: you can use VML (there's another one too I think but can't remember) which let you draw your graphs as vectors.

Another way is to stretch images i.e. get yourself a single pixel image and alter the width and height properties on an image to draw rectangles. You can do this in tables or div blocks. Fiddly but it works.

And another way is to draw the bitmap dynamically on the server when its requested and just stream it down (much easier than it sounds: you can just point an img tag's src attribute to an asp page for example as I recall).

If your graphs don't have to be realtime (i.e. they summarise up to the end of yesterday for example) then you can just build the images once a day and upload them overnight. The building and uploading can of course be a manual or automatic process.....

I could ramble on!!! There's a tonne of ways to sort it out

I've used all those techniques at least once and they all work quite well: the choice of technique depending on the demands of the client and the overall system.

Edit:I think I've also done it with sized div blocks once.

[goldbricker]

Have a look at Office Web Components specifically the Charting component tool that comes with Office. I think should be able to do what are looking for. I had a look for some help on the MS site and this was the best I could find, but there should be more information available:

Chart control help