Saturday, May 10, 2008

More on Graphs in PowerBuilder 11.5

Last week I posted a screen shot of the new 3D Rendering capabilities being added to some of the 3D graphs in PowerBuilder 11.5. It was met with mixed reviews on the PowerBuilder Futures newsgroup (forums.sybase.com) so I went back to the drawing board to see what I could come up with. Apparently there are quite a few configuration settings one can set programmatically to render better looking graphs. For example, the primary color scheme default can be changed by making a couple of function calls for each data point or series. Here is a screen shot of an example application I am putting together to be released when 11.5 ships:


This feature is still in development so the legend doesn't take advantage of the translucency property yet.
Now lets look at a 3D chart that contains a series. First here is a screen shot of the original 3D graph style available in PowerBuilder 11.2 and earlier (and still available in 11.5 if you like the retro look):


Now lets see that same chart with the new 3D (DirectX) rendering turned on and translucency set on some of the series:


Looks a lot better. The new 3D rendering capability will be available for the following 3D graph styles: Area, Column, Pie, Bar, and Line. This should meet the majority of users' 3D graph needs. If you need something more powerful or want a wider selection of charting options, take a look at the FusionCharts demo available on CodeXchange at:

8 comments:

jorge said...

The presentations of graphics for users are going to be impressive ...
an excellent presentation.

Jorge Alcántara
Lima - Perú

Chuck said...

Looks great! I'm looking forward to adding this capability to my SurveyGold software, which depends heavily upon DataWindow graphs for presentation and print graphics.

While you're thinking about graph enhancements, my customers continually ask for the percentage values that appear in the pie graph to be available in bar and column graphs. I'm wondering if that's on the list of enhancements?

dnd666 said...

It looks very good.
I'm trying to make a graphic like yours.
I did everything but the borders of my 3d pie are rounded, not squared like yours!
How did you do that? Couldn't find anything in the help.
Thank you.

John B said...

Why does it have to install DirectX on first use, even if you already have DirectX 9.0c installed? This is not acceptable in my organisation. In any case, my clients do not have administrator privileges.

Unknown said...

Hi there, on another matter, I just want to ask if there are ways to manipulate an acrobat reader/viewer ocx object in PB 11 so that besides loading stored pdf objects, we can also restrict copying, printing and saving while being viewed from a windows object launched from a PB application
Thanks very much in advance.

Unknown said...

Hi there, on another matter, I just want to ask if there are ways to manipulate an acrobat reader/viewer ocx object in PB 11 so that besides loading stored pdf objects, we can also restrict copying, printing and saving while being viewed from a windows object launched from a PB application

Unknown said...

really . this PowerBuilder version Graphics is good Quality . I already makes a presentation . thanks for sharing this information.

lauren said...

The new 3D Rendering capabilities being added to some of the 3D graphs in PowerBuilder 11.5 are really amazing.The graphs with 3D effect really look beautiful.They also attract attention towards the data involved
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