What are the various charting tools that are available for displaying charts on a web page using ASP.NET?
I know about commercial tools such as Dundas and Infragistics.
I could have "googled" this but I want to know the various tools that SO participants have used? Any free charting tools that are available are also welcome to be mentioned.
Hey - don't know if this works for ASP.NET but I've used the ZedGraph tool for my winforms apps and it is really nice.
If you use SQL Server, then SQL Server reporting services is not bad. It includes a free version of Dundas chart controls which allows you to do basic charting. There are are couple of issues with presentation and making it Firefox friendly but it's a pretty simple solution. - If you've SQL Server of course!
ZedGraph works superbly in ASP .NET, and is a superb charting package. Really flexible, and makes attractive graphs. The graphs are generated as static images (PNG by default) and it automatically deletes old ones.
Also, it is widely supported, has a great wiki, and a decent code-project tutorial (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/graphics/zedgraph.aspx).
I used Chart Director for a medium sized project, and loved it. It's incredibly feature-rich, has pretty good documentation, and an amazingly good support forum -- it's one of those ones where you ask a question, and a guy who works for the company that produces the software almost invariably answers it within a few hours. I used it with PHP and MySQL, but as far as I know it works with ASP.NET as well.
If you do not mind using Flash to display your graphs, Open Flash Charts supports a lot of languages. This was also the choice used for the Stackoverflow reputation tracker piece as mentioned in this question
You might like to take a look at the new Google Visualization API. Saw a presentation on this at yesterday's Google Dev. Day in London and it looked very interesting.
While it is currently only able to work with data retrieved from Google Spreadsheets, expanding it to handle data retrieval from other sources is a high priority for the Viz. team.
HTH.
cheers,
Rob
What about using Flotr? The syntax is pretty clean and you can produce some pretty nifty graphs (Check out some examples) with minimal effort.
I would look no farther than Dundas if you have the cha-ching to pay for it. I've used it on several projects and not found a better option. Cheaper with better licensing, yes, but not better in terms of functionality.
For free flash charting, you may look at FusionCharts Free. Or, if you want more professional and are ready to shell out $$$, look at FusionCharts v3