In most usage scenarios,
the data displayed in a Microsoft Chart control comes from some dynamic source, such as from a database query.
The appearance of
the
chart can be modified dynamically, as well; past installments in this article series showed how to programmatically customize
the axes, labels, and other appearance-related
settings. However, it is possible to statically define
the chart's data and appearance strictly through
the control's declarative markup. One of
the demos examined in
the Getting Started article rendered a column chart with seven columns whose labels and values were
defined statically in
the <asp:Series> tag's <Points> collection.
Given this functionality, it should come as no surprise that
the Microsoft Chart
Controls also support serialization. Serialization is
the process of persisting
the
state of a control or an object to some other medium, such as to disk. Deserialization is
the inverse process, and involves taking
the persisted data and recreating
the
control or object. With just a few lines of code you can persist
the appearance settings,
the data, or both to a file on disk or to any stream. Likewise, it takes just a few
lines of codes to reconstitute a chart from
the persisted information.
This article shows how to use
the Microsoft Chart Control's serialization functionality by examining a demo application that allows users to create custom charts, specifying
the data to plot and some appearance-related settings.
The user can then save a "snapshot" of this chart, which persists its appearance and data to a record in a database.
From another page, users can view these saved chart snapshots. Read on to learn more!
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