Using a Picture control's draw methods on web enabled forms

[Rich Cassell]

Hello,

I've been toying with the idea of incorporating graphs and charts into our web application to show data in a more user-friendly way, however, it seems that you can't use the 'draw' methods of a Picture control on Jade Web Enabled Forms. Nothing happens. Other methods, such as backColor, work fine.

Is there likely to be something i'm doing wrong or is it just another limitation of Jade Web Enabled Forms? If so, has anybody who is using the same technology found any clever ways of making graphs for this purpose? I'm using Jade 6.2.17 and am happy to use applets etc if that's a possibility.

Any help / advice will be appreciated.

Cheers,

Rich

[allistar]

This doesn't specifically answer your question, so apologies if it's a bit of a tangent. I have not used the Jade web enabled forms technology before (but rather opt to use other ways of getting data from a Jade database to a webpage). I recommend you take a look at the graphing capabilities of Sencha (or more specifically, ExtJS). Their widgets (and graphing in particular) are very nice, and generating the graphs is a piece of cake.

[Rich Cassell]

Hi Allistar, thanks for your reply.

We regularly question our use of Web Enabled Forms on the basis of it's limitations but as yet haven't moved over to another technology. When we upgrade to 6.3 we'll then have more technologies available to us so i imagine we'll look then at changing it.

Thanks for the info! I'll check out Sencha and repost if i hit any problems.

Thanks again!

Rich

[Rich Cassell]

Hi again,

Ok, beginners questions coming up!

I've downloaded the Sencha ExtJS package and would now like to start playing with the contents. Obviously, the files are all .js and i've never yet used JavaScript files within JADE so i've no idea how to use the widgets within my application.

Has anybody used external JavaScript files within their Web applications? I just need some basic guidance of how to get them in there then i can probably work out how to interact with them...

Thanks,

Rich

[allistar]

I've never used (nor wanted to use) the Jade web enabling framework, so cannot answer your question sorry. To get the ExtJS framework to work you need to make sure the css and js files are included in the header of the HTML file that is displayed in the browser.

[Rich Cassell]

Hi allistar,

Thanks for your reply. I'll have a play with trying to get the files into the HTML Header, more reading afoot i think!

When we first decided on a web version of our application the Web Enabled Forms framework offered everything that we needed. It's a very simple, yet effective system, and it really didn't need to do anything too advanced. However, recently the ideas we've been having for it have been simple, yet still too advance for simple HTML capabilities so really we need to move to a new technology asap. The problem is, with the system complete and working in Web Enabled Forms, it will need a total re-write to the new technology and that's development time that we'd struggle to find. I think we're going to have to find it though...

Thanks again,

Rich

[Dave Patrick]

I seem to remember one of the systems I used to work on did something along the lines of performing the drawing functions on a picture control, then converting the contents of the Picture control to an image file and embedding that image file in a Jade Web Enabled form. Sorry I can't be more helpful, like providing a code sample, because that code would appear not to exist any more. But it did manage to draw a simple bar graph and display it on a Jade Web Enabled form.

[Rich Cassell]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your reply.

I think i'll play around with that idea and see if i can come up with something working. Thanks. As i mentioned previously i think we're going to have to speed up our upgrade to higher Jade versions that are .Net compatible etc to give us this functionality, anything else using Web Enabled Forms on 6.2 will be a bit of a bodge.

Thanks again,

Rich