Section 4 - Spider Charts

A spider chart is a specialized type of chart that represents your data on a series of spokes (or radians), where each spoke is an attribute you are trying to measure, and the spoke's value is the distance from the center of the graph.

A commercial example of using the spider chart is in the food processing industry. The spider chart is used to rate new foods, and each radian of the chart is a feature they are trying to measure.

Create a new project, make a new instance of the Flipper Graph Control, and add the following data to your program:

FlpGrf.DataValue(1, 0) = "Salt" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(2, 0) = "Sweet" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(3, 0) = "Sour" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(4, 0) = "Bitter" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(5, 0) = "Raw Flour" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(6, 0) = "Baked Flour" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(7, 0) = "Blueberry Intensity" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(8, 0) = "Vanillin" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(9, 0) = "Shortening" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(10, 0) = "Fruity" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(11, 0) = "Throat Burn" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(12, 0) = "Pasty" 
FlpGrf.DataValue(13, 0) = "Cardboard" 

FlpGrf.DataValue(1, 1) = 24.8 
FlpGrf.DataValue(2, 1) = 100.6 
FlpGrf.DataValue(3, 1) = 29.8 
FlpGrf.DataValue(4, 1) = 19.9 
FlpGrf.DataValue(5, 1) = 29.8 
FlpGrf.DataValue(6, 1) = 41 
FlpGrf.DataValue(7, 1) = 53.9 
FlpGrf.DataValue(8, 1) = 14.8 
FlpGrf.DataValue(9, 1) = 22.3 
FlpGrf.DataValue(10, 1) = 31 
FlpGrf.DataValue(11, 1) = 22.5 
FlpGrf.DataValue(12, 1) = 16.3 
FlpGrf.DataValue(13, 1) = 5 

FlpGrf.DataValue(1, 2) = 19.1 
FlpGrf.DataValue(2, 2) = 84 
FlpGrf.DataValue(3, 2) = 22.3 
FlpGrf.DataValue(4, 2) = 12.5 
FlpGrf.DataValue(5, 2) = 22.9 
FlpGrf.DataValue(6, 2) = 38.1 
FlpGrf.DataValue(7, 2) = 40.4 
FlpGrf.DataValue(8, 2) = 16 
FlpGrf.DataValue(9, 2) = 31.3 
FlpGrf.DataValue(10, 2) = 33.1 
FlpGrf.DataValue(11, 2) = 16 
FlpGrf.DataValue(12, 2) = 17.5 
FlpGrf.DataValue(13, 2) = 7.3

Set the graph type to 2 for the spider type. Then assign the columns their proper types and axes. The spider type is column type 10. The spider graph data needs to be set to axis 1.

FlpGrf.GraphType = 2 

FlpGrf.Column = 0 
FlpGrf.ColumnAxis = 0 
  
FlpGrf.Column = 1 
FlpGrf.ColumnAxis = 1 
FlpGrf.ColumnType = 10 
  
FlpGrf.Column = 2 
FlpGrf.ColumnAxis = 1 
FlpGrf.ColumnType = 10

Each spoke on the spider plot represents the x-axis data with one spoke for each row. The distance from the center is the y1-axis scale. The scale is from the AxisScaleMin to the AxisScaleMax values.

Last modified on: Friday, October 19, 2001