Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Overview
  • Key Product Features
• Where can I go for additional resources and help?
• Section 1: NetCharts Server Architecture
  • Application Server Structure
  • Project Structure
• Section 2: The Developer Console
  • Viewing the Developer Console
  • Developer Home Page – The Project List
  • Project Contents Page
  • Page Editor
  • Test Window
• Section 3: Building a Simple Chart Application
  • Step 1 – Create a Project
  • Step 2 – Create and Edit CDL Chart Template
  • Step 3 – Use CDX Variables to Get Data into the Chart
  • Step 4 – Integrate Chart into JSP/ASP/Other Environment
• Section 4: Building a Data Source-Aware Chart Application
  • Step 1 – Create a Project
  • Step 2 – Getting Access to Data
  • Step 3 – Create and Edit CDL Chart Template
  • Step 4 – Integrate Chart into JSP/ASP/.NET/Other Environment
• Section 5: Displaying Tabular Data (Tables)
  • Step 1 – Create a Project
  • Step 2 – Getting Data
  • Step 3 – Create the Table
  • Step 4 – Integrate the Table
• Section 6: Building a Drill-Down Enabled Application
  • Drill Down Options
  • Step 1 – Create a Project
  • Step 2 – Create a Data Source
  • Step 3 – Create the Charts
  • Step 4 – Integrate Drill-Down Behavior
• Section 7: Leveraging the Run-Time Data Cache
  • Step 1 – Create a Project
  • Step 2 – Create a Data Source
  • Step 3 – Create the Charts
  • Step 4 – Writing to the Cache
• Section 8: Dynamic Data Access Explained
  • Data Clients
  • Named Data Set (NDS) Resource
  • NDSPlugInAdapter Feature Set
  • NDS CDL Formatter
  • NDS Process Modules
  • NDS PlugIns
  • CDX Variables
• Section 9: NetCharts Server Chart Engine Explained
  • Chart Definition Language (CDL)
  • Chart Types
  • The Server Generated Image (SGI)
• Section 10: Accessibility Mode (Section 508 Compliance)
  • Accessibility Mode Parameters
  • Integrating Accessibility Mode
• Section 11: Internationalization (I18N)
  • Unicode
  • Symbol Test
  • Using Unicode Characters in CDL
• Section 12: Troubleshooting
  • Debugging Tools
  • The Error Log
  • The Message Log
  • Resolving Common Issues
• Section 13: Table Parameters
  • Global Table Parameters
  • Column Parameters
  • Row Parameters
  • Cell Parameters
  • Table Pagination Parameters
• Section 14: Named Data Set Parameters
  • NDSPlugInAdapter Parameters (Inherited by Jdbc, CSV, XML, and Cache NDS Plugins)
  • JDBC PlugIn Parameters (Also Includes all NDSPlugInAdapter Parameters)
  • CSV/Flat File PlugIn Parameters (Also Includes all NDSPlugInAdapter Parameters)
  • XML PlugIn Parameters (Also Includes all NDSPlugInAdapter Parameters)
  • Cache PlugIn Parameters (Also Includes all NDSPlugInAdapter Parameters)

Introduction

Overview

NetCharts Server is a graphical reporting system that can be used for business performance metrics, executive information systems, dashboards, and much more. At a technical level, it is a specialized application server that enables administrators to deploy, manage, and share dynamic charts, tables, reports and dashboards. Applications may be completely developed and deployed using NetCharts Server, or NetCharts Server can simply serve visualization elements to other applications. NetCharts Server and Designer is designed to make creating business intelligence (BI)charts, reports and applications easy.

NetCharts Server is designed for uploading or importing applications created in NetCharts Designer. NetCharts Designer produces collections of application elements, such as pages, data connections, etc., called Projects. Projects are exported from NetCharts Designer and then imported into NetCharts Server.

As the name implies, a BI application requires the successful marriage of two elements: data and presentation, the result of which is useful information. NetCharts Server helps you manage efficient BI applications with a professional appearance, on time, and under budget.

Key Product Features

NetCharts Rendering Engines

Only NetCharts Server integrates the award-winning, widely used NetCharts rendering engines into a powerful, scalable enterprise server solution. NetCharts rendering engines have been selected by thousands of developers worldwide as the charting product of choice for many different applications. With its easy-to-implement Chart Definition Language (CDL) and thousands of configurations to choose from, NetCharts Server delivers dynamic, fast, and visually-appealing charts, graphs, reports and dashboards.

Built-in Drilldown Support

The tables and charts generated by NetCharts Server provide support for adding drilldown features to your applications. Developers may simply specify a JavaScript method or URL as a drill action. As data items are selected, the JavaScript method or URL is activated and selection-specific data is passed along to that JavaScript or URL. The developer then has the option to take any appropriate actions (refreshing with different data, drilling to another page, etc).

Flexible Development and Deployment Options

NetCharts Server offers a wide array of development and deployment options. Developers can work from local or remote locations and environments in which they are familiar. NetCharts Server can be deployed in any n-tiered architecture or even embedded within other application servers.

Separate Administrative and Development Environments

NetCharts Server provides the ability to isolate administrative functions from development. This allows users with different needs and skill sets to be able to work together in enterprise environments. When in production, development functions may be removed from the production server to save space, increase security, and ensure the integrity of the application.

Project-Centric Development

NetCharts Server organizes related files into projects and provides controls for creating, maintaining, uploading and archiving these projects.

API Toolkits

Developers may access NetCharts Server functions using language toolkits for JSP and .NET. In addition, users may request content via a URL, allowing any web-aware programming or scripting language to obtain charts, tables or full reports from a NetCharts Server.

Comprehensive Data Management

NetCharts Server has extensive support for extracting and formatting data for use with charts, tables, and web pages. Data may be dynamically requested from databases, flat files, or XML documents, and then aggregated, sorted, filtered and analyzed to produce the desired output. Developers may also explicitly push data from legacy systems into NetCharts Server.

NetCharts Server’s sophisticated data caching allows all page objects (charts, tables, and page controls) to share data cache entries, thus significantly optimizing performance.

Tight Integration with NetCharts Designer

NetCharts Server is designed to work closely with NetCharts Designer, the desktop development tool that will dramatically reduce development time and leverage the many features of NetCharts Server.

Where can I go for additional resources and help?

In addition to the online help file there are three additional places where you can obtain assistance:

• Visual Mining Customer Support Portal: Here you will find FAQS, tips and tricks and links to other resources that will help you create dashboards.
• Your Visual Mining Account Representative – send them an email, or call them. In case you’re not sure who your account rep is, send an email to sales@visualmining.com.
• Send us a question via Visual Mining support: support@visualmining.com or Phone 1.301.795.2200, or Toll-Free within the continental US: 800.308.0731