Dynamic Charting Assistance Requested

[Charles W Buege <cbuege@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello out there - 

If anyone can help me, it'll be greatly appreciated!!

I'm working with the pChart (http://www.pchart.net) PHP chart framework 
and think it is a fantastic program/product.  I am NOT knocking pChart at 
all - I'm just looking for help from my fellow users out there and trying 
to use pChart in a way that it isn't really designed for/may not be able 
to do.

Here is the project I'm working on:  I'm retrieving data from an IBM 
iSeries AS/400 with a DB2 data source back end and I'm getting the data 
fine (MAD props out to ADOdb Database Abstraction Library for PHP - 
http://adodb.sourceforge.net - works like a CHAMP!!!) but I need to create 
some graphs off of said data.  Well, pChart works GREAT for the graphs now 
that I understand a bit more about how it created the PNG graphs on the 
fly.  Rather, my users have two specific requests for capabilities on 
these charts:
1.  When they mouse-over the actual data, they want to be able to have a 
fly-over window show up with the exact value of what they are looking at 
(lower priority)
2.  When they are moused-over the data, they want the ability to 'drill 
down' into the data by simply clicking on the column/data point/slice of 
pie chart/etc. (MUCH higher priority)

My idea with pChart is to find out what the coordinates are for each of 
the points of data on the chart, overlay the image that is generated with 
an image map, and have the image map do the work then allowing them to 
'click into' the chart, bringing them to either a new page or new chart, 
depending on the page they are on.

So, first off, does anyone have any suggestions of a better/different way 
to do something like this?  This is just the idea I've come up with so 
far, so I'm not committed/married to it.  I just think that using the 
image map would be the best/fastest way of doing this.

The next question I would pose to everyone out there is if they know of 
any other charting frameworks out there that do this same thing that they 
would recommend.  If you have any more detailed questions or I am 
neglecting anything, please feel free to e-mail me at (cbuege at moreycorp 
dot com) or just post a reply to this message.

Now, I'm aware that Google Charts can do this very nicely, but we are 
trying to keep all of the applications in house as the charts that will be 
generated won't always be on machines that will have internet access, so 
we don't want to depend on Google for files external to the company.

Thanks in advance to anyone out there that can help!!

Charles



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