[Melbourne-pm] Graphing / Charts]

[Ben Marsh]

* Scott Penrose (scottp at dd.com.au) wrote:
> Hey Guys
> 
> I have the ongoing ever need for development some reports which  
> include some graphs and charts.
> 
> Our desktop product takes a rough form of HTML and generates FO for  
> use in generating PDFs. This is wonderful in the idea that we can  
> change look and feel with CSS and if we need, XSL, to change our  
> reports very easily.
> 
> However, trying to add Charting functionality to that is not  
> something I fancy doing.
> 
> So I am looking at what charting and reporting is out there, which  
> allows an XML document structure to define the report.
> 
> As you can imagine, generating XML (in our case a subset of XHTML)  
> from a database is easy, combining it with other documents is also  
> easy, having parts of it generated from other systems is easy.
> 
> So I realised, maybe there is already a solution out there. For  
> example, it might be a simple system that generate SVG charts from a  
> data source, that I can then pump through my FOP with some other XML  
> for the text part of the report to generate PDFs.
> 
> So then I thought, maybe this has all be achieved already, which is  
> where you guys come in. Any ideas ?
>

I haven't tried to do this yet but want to look at it in the near
future.  A quick search of CPAN shows SVG::TT::Graph which is a base for 

SVG::TT::Graph::Bar
SVG::TT::Graph::Pie 
SVG::TT::Graph::Line 
SVG::TT::Graph::BarHorizontal 
SVG::TT::Graph::TimeSeries 

So I assume you can do all these charts.  Do you have a particular chart
type in mind?

Ben Marsh