Flex Charting

I've started to use the Flex Charting package in my Flex application that I'm working on. You need to pay for the Charting license separately from Flex Builder, which sort of irritated me. I hate having to pay an additional fee on top of a package that I already bought. Especially since I though the Charting was included with Flex Builder. After testing out the charts for the past couple of weeks, it might be worth it.

I found that setting up the graph and pushing data to it is really really easy. And as with all the Flex components, it just looks nice. On the application I'm currently working on, I need to grab data points from a binary file and graph the results. The catch is that the chart is fairly small, around 400 pixels by 250 pixels and there will probably be a lot of data points. My concern would be that the chart would not be able to display the graph very well and the large data set would either not be handled very well or would look messy. As a test, I sent around 10,000 data points to the chart just to see what would happen.

This is about the size of the chart on my application. As you can see, the Flex Chart looks really good. Granted, that the data ended up with a very distinct pattern, but for the most part, that is what we will be expecting.

So this will probably be the last time you will see the Flex Charting Trial watermark on my graphs. We will be ordering Flex Builder 3 Professional next week.