Wrting Reports May Actually be Fun Now
For as long as I have been writing software professionally there has always been a need to create reports. I have always found this be be boring but a necessary evil. The basic idea is to query a database munge the data and display it. The hardest part was showing the data to people in a format that they would understand and want to use. I have used different methods from table to graph to create excel spreadsheet. It was always the presentation of the data that seemed to take the longest. Well I think that is all about to change. Last week Google released their Charting API. It provides a nice and easy to use interface to create all kinds of configurable charts. As a developer you specify the url for the browser to retrieve and thier engine does the rest. For example here is the code that I used to generate the 3D pie chart:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:10.0,20.0,70.0 &chs=300×100&chl=Savings|Taxes|Expenses
That was all there was to it. I didn’t have to understand some crazy graphing javascript code, I didn’t have to play with image magic, I just had to load the url. While this method isn’t great for larger datasets this method is perfect for small datasets. I have already thought of a couple cool ways to use this api, It has actually made me excited to write reporting software now.
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January 19th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
[...] Reports still not fun When the Google Charts API came out a couple of weeks ago I mention that I thought that writing reports would now be fun. I had an opportunity to try out the api in a [...]