Can we create drill downs with JFree Charts

[Sudhir]

I'm looking to create charts which will have the capabity to have drill downs. Does anyone know if JFree Charts have that capability ?

-Sudhir

[SeanMcCrohan]

What sort of drill-down did you have in mind? There's a ChartMouseClick event that you can use to catch clicks on a chart entity, for instance.

[Sudhir]

I'm planning to have a pie-chart and clicking on any area within the pie-chart should take me to a report page(different parameters to be passed in the URL based on which part of chart the user click's..)

[SeanMcCrohan]

Ah. Then yes, you ought to be able to handle that in JFreeChart. Getting the URL text from a clicked-on chart entity is pretty straightforward.

[Sudhir]

Can you please give me some tips/hints as to how we could implement that.

[SeanMcCrohan]

Only on the Java side; I haven't done anything with JFreeChart as an applet. Set up a ChartMouseListener, register it with your chart, and then get the URL from the clicked chart entity with something like:

Code: Select all

	public void chartMouseClicked(ChartMouseEvent event) {
		System.out.println(event.getEntity().getURLText());
	}

[david.gilbert]

If you are doing this in a client application, you need to add a ChartMouseListener to the ChartPanel, then check the events to see what has been clicked on.

If, on the other hand, you are working on a web application, you need to create an HTML image map for your chart image. There is an ImageMapUtilities class to help with that...explaining how it works will take more time than I have right now. You can customise the URLs in the image map by setting URL generators in the plot or renderer classes.