Difference between revisions of "TAChart Tutorial: Chart Tools"

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ChartTools have made some progress after the official version 1.0 of Lazarus has been released. Therefore, it may be advantageous to use the current trunk version from svn, otherwise some topics of this tutorial will not be available.
 
ChartTools have made some progress after the official version 1.0 of Lazarus has been released. Therefore, it may be advantageous to use the current trunk version from svn, otherwise some topics of this tutorial will not be available.
  
== Preparations ==
+
== Preparation ==
 
We need a chart to play with. You can use any chart that you ever created for our exercises, but I'll be using here the simple chart of the [[TAChart tutorial: Getting started|Getting started tutorial]].  
 
We need a chart to play with. You can use any chart that you ever created for our exercises, but I'll be using here the simple chart of the [[TAChart tutorial: Getting started|Getting started tutorial]].  
  

Revision as of 18:16, 2 October 2012

Introduction

Charts are powerful to display relationships between data. They get even more powerful if the user can interact with them, for example by zooming into a crowded series to display more details, by panning the visible viewport to other features, by reading values from the series or by measuring characteristic parameters of the plot.

The TAChart package is equipped with a powerful collection of tools to help creating interactive charts. In this tutorial, we want to show how to apply zooming and panning in your own programs, in another tutorial we will focus on data tools to analyze data interactively.

If you are not familiar with TAChart we recommend that you have a look at the Getting started tutorial. Of course, you must have some experience with Lazarus and FPC.

ChartTools have made some progress after the official version 1.0 of Lazarus has been released. Therefore, it may be advantageous to use the current trunk version from svn, otherwise some topics of this tutorial will not be available.

Preparation

We need a chart to play with. You can use any chart that you ever created for our exercises, but I'll be using here the simple chart of the Getting started tutorial.

tachart getting started step6.png

Built-in Tools

Zooming - the easy way

Zooming is very easy - you don't have to do anything to implement it since it is built into the heart of the chart component. You just have to drag a rectangle with the left mouse button down around the feature of interest that you want to see in detail. However, you should keep in mind that you have to drag the mouse from the top-left to the right-bottom corner of the rectangle to get the zoom effect. After you release the mouse button, the region is blown up to fill the entire chart. Easy.

ZoomPan01.png ZoomPan02.png

You can repeat this procedure to zoom into the chart deeper and deeper.

If you want to restore the original viewport just click into the chart with the left button, or drag a rectangle in any -- except for the top-left to right-bottom -- direction.

Maybe, for some reason, you do not like this behavior. TChart has a property AllowZoom with which you can turn off the zooming capability. Beyond that, there is nothing else to control the default zooming action. But don't give up: A bit further down we will discuss the ChartTools, and they give you almost unlimited access to any interactive feature.

Panning - the easy way

After you have zoomed into a chart you may want to shift the viewport a bit to find a better view. This operation is called "panning". Unfortunately, the released version of Lazarus (v1.0) does not have built-in panning capabilities. Only recently a default panning operation has been introduced into the trunk version of Lazarus. For this purpose, you hold down the right mouse button, the cursor transforms into a 4-arrow-shape to indicate that you can move the viewport around by dragging.

ZoomPan03.png

As with zooming you can restore the original viewport by clicking into the chart, or by dragging a rectangle in any direction, except from top-left to bottom-right. Note that you use the left mouse button for "un-panning" although you had used the right button for panning.

TChart currently does not have a property AllowPan to turn off panning. As we will see shortly, panning can be turned off also with ChartTools, so this is no real disadvantage.

Using ChartTools

Basics

Tools for zooming

Tools for panning

Using the TChartNavPanel and the TChartNavScrollbar

Some background on Extents

A combined zoom/drag tool