Terry Apodaca

We had a very large project that required some pretty intense charting of data…coming from an Oil and Gas company. So, you can only imagine the amount of data we had to massage and chart in some way, shape, or form.

We used a very nice set of controls for this project in Telerik. They are by far my favorite set of proprietary controls for the .NET Framework. The project was heavily built around these controls so it was only natural to want to keep with them. One problem…98% of the charts had to be Logarithmic. If you are not familiar with this…its when a charts Y Axis is equally spaced with labels dramatically increased (1, 10, 100, 1000, so on) instead of your normal Linear charting (1, 2, 3, 4, etc).

This presented a problem because the Telerik RadChart did not represent the logarithmic minor ticks and lines properly. They didn’t increase and scale the way they were suppose to. It’s hard to explain in words, so here is a screenshot:

The image above still shows a Linear scale even though it’s actually Logarithmic. Well, I searched all over the internet to see if this was just a bug in the Telerik RadChart control or if I was just doing something wrong. Turns out, Telerik knows (recently) about this issue and it has been logged. I added a reply to that thread (in the link) asking if there was any update on the issue…and as you can read there…they said they were not going to fix this. They did offer a workaround though…and here is a screenshot:

What they said to do was just remove the Minor Grid Lines and Ticks from the chart. Well, I had already done that as a temporary fix, but if you know anything about the oil and gas industry then you know how sensitive and important the data is. So, when we are charting their data it is very important to be as precise as possible. The minor grid lines were very important. (BTW, this is just test data in the images, so don’t worry about any issues about showing the clients stuff).

I did some more digging and searching because I really didn’t want to spend too much more time and/or money on this Charting need. I was very lucky too. I came across Microsoft’s latest Charting Controls (add-on to Visual Studio 2008). What’s even better is that as of VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4 it will be already incorporated so there won’t be any installation needed. It did take me about a day to configure, get the data bound to it, make it pretty, etc…but this was the solution I ended up using. And, it turned out to be a lot better…and much more visually appealing. Here is the final:

My only other option would have been some Flash solution or Silverlight. And if you know me very well, you know that I HATE Flash and/or Silverlight. This is one time I can say Hurray for Microsoft this time.