Creating your first Chart > Overview
 

It's always a good idea to get inspired before embarking upon anything. So, let's take a few minutes to go cruising around a sample column chart generated by FusionCharts. To create a sample chart, we need to assemble the following three elements:

  • The SWF file for the specific chart (FC2Column.swf – column chart as in our case)
  • An HTML container for the graph object
  • XML Data file which tells the SWF file what to plot

Before we really start on, we need a playground where we can play around with this. So, create a new web application folder FusionCharts under your web application root (wwwroot in case you are working with ASP/ASP.NET). And now for this example, create a new folder MyFirstChart under the newly created FusionCharts folder.

To install FusionCharts for the newly created web application, all we need to do is copy the swf files from FusionCharts_Lite_1_0 > Charts in the download package to any folder of your web application. For the sake of ease, we copy all swf files from FusionCharts_Lite_1_0 > Charts to a newly created folder Charts in our web application. And lo! FusionCharts has been installed for your web application - all your scripts can now use FusionCharts to chart data. The folder structure should look something as under:

Next, we’ll see how to create the HTML file which would embed the FusionCharts chart object.