MindFusion Announces the Release of Its Completely Redesigned WinForms Chart Control

SOFIA, Bulgaria - July 18, 2016 - PRLog -- MindFusion WinForms chart control has been completely redesigned and developed from scratch to achieve a lean software architecture, greatly improved
performance and a huge number of new features.

Brand new data model

Data that should be drawn in charts is read through an interface called Series, whose instances can be assigned to the Series properties of Chart and
SeriesRenderer classes. Developers can implement this interface in their own model classes to avoid duplicating data. The library includes several pre-defined series classes that can be used to specify data via IList or array objects.

New rendering model

Chart graphics are drawn inside Plot components by SeriesRenderer-derived objects. Each plot can contain multiple series renderers from same or different types. For example area, line and bar graphics can be drawn in the same plot by adding AreaRenderer, LineRenderer and BarRenderer objects to its SeriesRenderers collection. Chart controls automatically generate a series renderer of appropriate type for their Series.

Dashboard

The newly added Dashboard control can contain multiple plots, axes, legends, images, gauges and text blocks arranged in dynamic layout. Individual components can be added to dashboard's default RootPanel or LayoutPanel containers, or for more complex layouts add intermediary panels such as
GridPanel and StackPanel to the default ones. To show different types of chart graphics, developers can add Plot2D to draw in 2D Cartesian coordinate system, Plot3D for 3D Cartesian system, and PolarPlot for polar coordinate system. To draw horizontal or vertical axes, the objects to add are respectively XAxisRenderer and YAxisRenderer. To show gauges, developers should add LinearGaugeRenderer or OvalGaugeRenderer, whose Gauge property contains the gauge model definition.

Print and export

The Dashboard control and Chart controls that derive from it expose Print and PrintPreview methods for printing on paper. The ExportImage and CreateImage methods generate bitmap image of the dashboard. The ExportPdf method exports the chart to a PDF (Portable Document Format) file. The ExportSvg method exports the chart to an SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file.

Styling

Values of appearance properties can come from several places in the component hierarchy. SeriesRenderer-derived objects can use attributes from their local SeriesStyle, from plot's SeriesStyle, or from the *Series properties in current Theme. Component classes use either their local properties or oones defined in a theme. By default, appearance properties in SeriesRenderer and Component classes have null values, which makes the drawing code use values from the theme.

Visit http://mindfusion.eu/winforms-chart.html to find out more about the WinForms chart control.