About the Tutorial

This tutorial is designed to give you the knowledge necessary to use many of the capabilities of the Flipper Graph ASP . The tutorial is split into sections for each graph type.

·      Section 1 introduces the essentials of the control. You will learn to develop various XY graph types, including line, bar, area, curved line. You will also learn how to customize your graphs with manual scaling, changing fonts, swapping axes, and much, much more.

·      Section 2 brings you to pie charts, and the methods for manipulating them. In this section, you will discover different ways of presenting your pie charts through use of labels, rotation, and pie-slice explosion. Learn how to convert from 2D to 3D pie charts as well!

·      Section 3 is about bubble charts. The data points are bubbles within the XY graph, where the radius of the bubbles is dependent on your data.

·      Section 4 covers how to create spider charts, where your data is represented as a series of spokes. Changing the grid pattern can result in the graph looking like the web of a spider, for which this kind of chart is named.

·      Section 5 introduces xyz graphs, which use three scale dimensions (height, width, and depth) to display your data as a mesh graph, line graph, or surface graph.

·      Section 6 is about graphic objects and the mouse. The Flipper control provides you with the ability to add various shapes within the control, such as rounded rectangles, ellipses, and text that can be rotated. You will also discover how to find graph data or graphic objects with the mouse, so that they can be manipulated.

How to Read the Tutorial

As a first time user of the Flipper Graph ASP , it is essential that you complete Section 1 of the tutorial. Section 1 will provide you with the fundamentals of programming the Flipper control, and from there, you can jump to any other section of the tutorial.

Each section of the tutorial has accompanying Visual Basic (VB) project files which are provided on disk for you. There names are respective to the sections (e.g., "section1.vbp"). These programs contain code for each of the examples provided in the sections.

You can either read through the tutorial and manually type the example code as it appears, or you can execute the programs from disk. The former method is probably the better way of learning how to use the control, but is not necessary.

For non-Visual Basic users, this tutorial is still for you. While the Syntax of the code might vary slightly from the language of your choice, you should be familiar enough with your language to make the transition from VB Syntax yours.

If you are typing in the code manually you will need to create a new program for each of the sections. Also, be aware that you may need to start a new program within a section.

For best results, go through the tutorial section sequentially, and type each line as it appears. You will not be able to jump around within a section, enter the code for a particular example, and expect to get the same results as pictured in the tutorial.

Graph Pictures

Throughout the examples of each section, graph pictures may be provided of how your program should appear if you have followed the instructions up to that point.

Conventions

·      The handle FlpGrf will be used to denote the instance of our Flipper object.

·      Any example code that you should type into your program will appear as follows:

some code here

·      Any side notes will be contained in this type of box:
 

     Did you know Mark McGwire was the first player to hit 30 or more homeruns in his first four seasons?

·      Lastly, whenever a property, method, or event of the Flipper Graph ASP is referenced, it will be denoted in bold characters (e.g., "the ColumnType property...").

Last modified on: Friday, August 16, 2002