Flexible Data Binding

Both Unbound and Bound Modes at Your Service

Chart your data - regardless of its source. The XtraCharts Suite provides you with the following data binding options:

• Bind the control to an external data source. Like our other data-aware controls, the data source you supply for the chart can be any object that supports the IList or IEnumerable interface. Therefore, you can bind the control to a table from a database or to any collection created in code.
• Use unbound mode. You need not create nor maintain any external data structures - you can provide data for XtraCharts directly. Each Series object provides a point collection so you can populate each individual series as needed.

Automatically Create Multiple Series

When using a data-bound chart control, you will sometimes need to filter the underlying data. For instance, you may need to compare information about individual car models while the data source contains data about all models. In such cases, you can create several pre-filtered data sources and bind them to each individual manually created series. The XtraCharts Suite also provides an internal means to filter data sources for each individual series. In either instance, you would normally create the series manually and repeat exactly the same customization steps for each.

Because we find that what we've described above is a common task when building charts, we've taken steps to significantly simplify it. All you need to do is to set up a series template and specify the filter field. The data source will automatically be broken down into subsets corresponding to unique values in the specified field. For each data subset, XtraCharts will create a series based upon the specified template.

Top N Values Display

In a continued effort to deliver more flexible data analysis options, here's one more feature that made it from the XtraPivotGrid to XtraCharts: the option to display only a few of the most important values (such as sales for a few best-selling car models). Simply specify the number of best values you're interested in and XtraCharts will automatically filter out the rest.

This feature also allows you to enable the remaining values (Others) – an aggregate value calculated against all records that were filtered out.