Originally shared by David Berneda

Originally shared by David Berneda

Big improvements in BIChart control.
Support for design-time has been accomplished and its now much more smart in determining what data to choose and how should it be plotted, in a totally automatic way. Of course, every setting can be customized manually or by code.

The automatic recognition so far is capable of:

-Deciding if the data (tables, subtables, etc) can be plotted using a 3D style (surface, contour etc), Financial (candle), Geographic (world maps) or 2D (XY).

-Based on the above, choose the "best" series class (Line, Bar, Point, etc etc) depending on many factors, like number of points, data range, etc.

-Determine the best style orientation (horizontal or vertical)

-Determine the best data direction (by rows or by columns)

-Choose an "stacked" mode automatically (stack, 100%, overlap, self-stack etc)

-Choose the "best" columns / fields to use for chart data and axis labels

-For 3D, plot values as "XYZ" or as a "grid" (using 3 columns), or as a "table" using all numeric columns available. X and Z data in grid mode can be of any kind (text, integer, etc), a map of unique values is internally constructed.

BIChart will gradually be improved with many more automatic decisions that can be done based on the data structure and values. The idea is: choose a "data" (any kind of structure) and get a reasonable chart output that can be fine-tuned. This saves big time !