New Plugin $Display type: Graph

[Sneddo]

This one is a long way off, but I think we should aim to support graphs as an output now that the resource code is pretty much done. Probably a 7.x release goal, but logging to get ideas flowing.

Will need to investigate different graphing APIs.

• Features and styling
• Graph types (pie, bar, line, etc)
• Local vs remote graph generation
• Embed image in report vs HTML reference

From memory Google has one that you can specify the graph parameters via URL, and we can download the resulting image to include in the report, or include in img tags.

[alanrenouf]

I try to stay away from anything that can not be reached locally, I like for this script to be downloaded and used without a bunch of pre-reqs or having to have access to the internet etc, I like this idea but finding a way to do it in HTML or Javascript or some kind of HTML5 I think would be the best answer here.

[Sneddo]

Yeah, I'd ideally like to stay away from Javascript and HTML5 as well, purely for the sake of email reports and the terrible support in Outlook. Possibly adding these in for richer standalone reports, so make it modular as possible.

Of course, it appears the the .NET framework may come to the rescue here withe the System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization class: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.datavisualization.charting.chart(v=vs.110).aspx

[alanrenouf]

That could work, generate the form on the server, save it as an image, base64 encode it and re-include it back in the HTML..... Ooooo Nice.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/richard_macdonald/archive/2009/04/28/3231887.aspx

[Sneddo]

That's the plan... and actually looks reasonably simple (famous last words!)

[Sneddo]

...I'll just leave this here...

Current work in progress. http://tinyurl.com/kdrz4fy

[smasterson]

Where's the Like button :-)

[alanrenouf]

Like? Where is the love button? What solution is this with? Any pre-reqs needed?

[Sneddo]

It's using the .Net data visualisation class.

I've created a helper function for use in plugins to create a chart object which is returned as the plugin detail (or as you see in the example, you can pass an array of charts object). Then just change the $display variable to "chart". A new display handler has been created to generate the chart, which is passed to the resource handling code to be included in the report.

The whole amount of plugins code to generate those graphs? About 4-6 lines from memory :)

I'll push some code to my repo today or tomorrow, I think this will need a bit of testing before we push it to the main repo, though with no plugins using charts it may not matter (yet).

[Sneddo]

So I've just pushed the code to my "charting" branch: https://github.com/Sneddo/vCheck-vSphere/tree/charting

Basically there are three changed files - vCheck.ps1, a demo plugin "Test Chart.ps1", and the VMware style (to include setting chart colour palette)

Still a couple of things left to do:

• Sort out why the background isn't being set correctly - it should be transparent by default.
• Make the cid base variable actually variable so that we can have more than one plugin with graphs (will tie in with the table of contents issue as well)
• Ability to set graph sizes in style (and probably other stuff like text size/font/colour eventually)
• I'd like to see if bar charts are meant to have the same bar colour
• Probably more after more testing!

[Sneddo]

Submitted pull #206 with the start of this. Really need some daring testers to play with it and break it :)

[Sneddo]

At this point, the code is in vCheck. Will close off this issue and any bug reports or feature requests can be raised as new issues.

[alanrenouf]

Did you have a sample plugin for this? I cant find "Test Chart.ps1" anywhere?

[alanrenouf]

Dont worry, worked it out