Windows Phone 7 Charting/Graphing Controls

15
votes

We're working on a Windows Phone 7 prototype application and we need a Graphing/Charting control to work with. We looked at the Silverlight Toolkit, which has some controls that look like they would work great. However, we can't get that to work. Whenever we add a control to the XAML from that toolkit, it will throw an exception when trying to load the XAML at runtime, even though it appears to work in the designer. I think that it's because there's some dependencies that the phone doesn't actually support.

Does anyone know how to fix the problem or know of charting software that works on Windows Phone 7?

Here's an example of code that doesn't work. We downloaded and installed the 4.0 beta of Silverlight Toolkit. Added the DLL as a reference. Added this to import the namespace:

xmlns:c="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Charting;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Toolkit"`

then added this to make a chart:

<c:Chart>
    <c:PieSeries>
        <c:PieSeries.ItemsSource>
            <l:IntList>
                <sys:Int32>23</sys:Int32>
                <sys:Int32>2</sys:Int32>
                <sys:Int32>1</sys:Int32>
                <sys:Int32>34</sys:Int32>
            </l:IntList>
        </c:PieSeries.ItemsSource>
    </c:PieSeries>
</c:Chart>

the designer shows the pie perfectly, however when I try to compile and deploy it throws an exception saying that it can't find the MainPage.xaml. Which leads me to believe that MainPage.xaml isn't compilign correctly (not sure, as I'm still a newbie at Silverlight)

Here's the exception:

System.Windows.Markup.XamlParseException occurred
  Message=2255 An error has occurred. [Line: 36 Position: 2]
  LineNumber=36
  LinePosition=2
  StackTrace:
     ...

on this line:

System.Windows.Application.LoadComponent(this, new System.Uri("/Twitpic;component/MainPage.xaml", System.UriKind.Relative));
9
silverlightwindows-phone-7

9 Answers

3
votes

You can probably reuse some of the things provided by the silverlight toolkit, which is open source:
http://silverlight.codeplex.com/Wikipage

You might have to recompile some stuff against the win phone APIs, but it should work :-)

2
votes

It looks like someone else has had the same issue as you and solved it by using the Silverlight Toolkit version 3

http://silverlightfeeds.com/post/2502/Windows_Phone_7_RTM_charting_using_the_Silverlight_Control_Toolkit.aspx

2
votes

If you are looking for great charting on WP7, I suggest Visifire. Note that its a commercial offering. Has gesture support too! I've seen very less charting vendors who've optimized charting for mobile-form-factor like these guys do.

You can try MS Toolkit, if you are looking for free basic charts.

1
votes

Playing around more, I was actually able to get Visifire to work. Just had to browse and add the reference to System.Windows.Browser. I don't know if this is the best way to make it work. But it'll do until the Silverlight Toolkit gets updated.

1
votes

Macadamian team developed and gives for free a Chart Control. You can pick it up at http://themobileexperience.macadamian.com/2010/05/chart-control-for-windows-phone-7.html

Ani

1
votes

Just a quick plug for my own graph control I recently released to open source:

Check it out, it scales to hundreds of thousands of points and responds to pinch,zoom,translate and tap gestures:

http://touchgraphwp7.codeplex.com/