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6483

answers:

11

I need some sort of interactive chart control for my .NET-based web app. I have some wide XY charts, and the user should be able to interactively scroll and zoom into a specific window on the x axis. Something that acts similar to the google finance control would be nice, but without the need for the date labels or the news event annotations. Also, I'd prefer to avoid Flash, if that's even possible. Can someone please give some recommendations of something that might come close?

EDIT: the "real" google timeline visualization is for date-based data. I just have numeric data. I tried to use that control for non-date data, but it seems to always want to show a date and demands that the first data column actually be a date.

+16  A: 

How about using the "real" google finance tool from the Google visualizations project?

http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/annotatedtimeline.html

smerickson
you could probably generalise this solution into a server control if you were interested in reuse.
Martin Clarke
A: 

I've recently used two generic libraries with my .NET work - they both have many different charttypes which include the zooming and scrolling you're after: one is free (ZedGraph) the other is not (Dundas).

I'd happily recommend them both. Dundas is better - but it isn't cheap. Zed is open source so can be quite informative to just read the code.

Unsliced
+1  A: 

The Zoom Scrollbar sample on the SoftwareFX site looks like what you are looking for:

http://demo.softwarefx.com/chartfx/aspnet/ajaxsamples/

Lou Franco
But this feels quite heavy and slow compared to other alternatives like Flotr or Google Visualization Annotated Timeline
Sung Meister
+1  A: 

Check out amCharts. There's XY Chart and Stock charts. Sure these are Flash based charts but I don't think you can have anything this nice and interactive without Flash or Silverlight these days.

Alan Mendelevich
+2  A: 

Have a look at the the Google vizualisation API, I guess this is what Google uses on Google Finance. I had a look at a few other chart API's, but this one is free and beautiful.

+4  A: 

You could try out Flotr, a nice javascript library. It has pretty decent mouse controls and is free to use.

TM
A: 

fusioncharts.com

free and commercial versions

cfdev9
A: 

jqplot is impressive and improving every day

dhrubo
A: 

Flash or Silverlight is required for a rich client experience; JS based solutions are not comparable, but may meet some specific lesser needs.

We recently launched a Silverlight based solution that was usability tested against both Yahoo Finance and Google Finance and proved to be superior across a variety of user classes.

We encourage you to judge for yourself: http://www.dotnetcharting.com/silverlight_charts.aspx

A live demo link is available at the bottom of that page and a free developer download (branded not for production use but without expiry) is available from the download link.

Silverlight offers features (e.g. true threading) which enable a better experience vs flash based implementations.

Chart Vendor
I didn't look closely into your solution, but since this looks like an ad (and this question is a good place for it, IMHO), I might as well voice few questions/concerns about it here. We have a large financial desktop WPF app in need of such control, so does it work in WPF, specifically w/o ajax+web-services (custom data aggregation happens on client)? Do you support more precise timestamps than days (going down to milliseconds)? If so, can you handle daylight saving changes properly? Does this control handle live updates to data?
repka
+2  A: 

This is the one you are looking for. An almost exact match for the Google Flash graph.

http://www.humblesoftware.com/finance/index

Shaun
A: 

Why not use this clone:

http://code.google.com/p/time-series-graph/

Quandary