We I'm looking for good WPF toolkit (ones that cost money) that can provide both powerful grid and charting. I'm not that up-to-date whats out there, so i was hoping anyone can assist me with where i should look for. some of the most needed features we need:
Grid:
Hierarchical tree grid
Charting:
panning and Zooming
3D charts
Empty Data point display
Line chart / Scatter Plot
any suggestion would be highly appreciated.
You might want to read this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1152016/best-charting-tool-for-silverlight-and-wpf
We're currently using two toolkits for WPF development:
Telerik
Infragistics
They both features charts and a powerful grid, plus a bunch of other things. There isn't much between them to be honest. Telerik seems to look a bit slicker. On the other hand the technical support you get from Infragistics is first class and well worth paying for. You can get a chat session with an actual developer within a couple of minutes and they usually have a solution for whatever problem you are facing.
I would happily recommend either of these.
Related
Has anyone tried or successfully implemented interactivity in the charts of the Silverlight Charting Toolkit? I want to grab a column for instance and move it up, so that the bound value is increased through my interaction with the chart.
I know there are commercial alternatives out there but really would like to know if it is possible with the toolkit or only achievable with disproportionate effort.
Thanks in advance.
This doesn't directly answer your question, but since the question has been sitting since March, I'll post it anyway.
Try Telerik's RadChart control. It supports a lot more than the standard stuff.
Telerik has a wide variety of interactive charts including this one that you can play around with. You may want to start with this page and click the "Other Chart Examples" drop down to see what they have to offer.
I need to enable zooming on the Silverlight charts I use - at the moment this is Silverlight Toolkit. As far as I've understood the SL Toolkit charts don't support zooming, however I'm looking into implementing this functionality. So far I haven't managed to get far: applying ScaleTransforms to the Series elements doesn't work as expected.
Can anyone provide me with example code on implementing zooming in Silverlight Toolkit?
I've previously looked into implementing zooming on the Silverlight Toolkit charts, however failed because of (probably) the following reasons:
Silverlight Toolkit charts don't seem to have been designed to be able to extend for zooming. There are no hooks that you could easily attack some zooming logic to, if you want to create zooming on them, you have to go much deeer.
The simplest way of implementing zooming is using ScaleTransform and RenderTransform to elements. In case of Silverlight Toolkit you want to apply this to the series. However just calculating the correct ScaleTransform and OffsetTransform are difficult enough
When scaling, you don't want everything to scale. If you zoom in 4x on a line series with points on it, you don't want the line to be 4x thicker and the points to be 4x larger. This means that even if you did implement applying the ScaleTransforms and RenderTransforms correctly, all you would get is a magnifying glass, which is still far from ideal.
After a few hours I gave up on adding this kind of support to the SL toolkit charts and instead looked for other components that support zooming and have a decent API to deal with it. These are the components I've found (though I'm sure there's more):
Visiblox Charts free version: it has a nice API and implenting zooming takes only a few lines of XAML according to this blog post (also see a post on a comparison with SL toolkit charts). Full disclosure: I have been heavily involved in development of this library.
Infragistics xamWebChart also claim to have support for zoom in the premium version of their charts
Telerik RadCharts also seem to allow zooming based on this example - though it's not clear to me whether you'd have to implement this functionality yourself.
Summing it up, I think the easiest way for you to go it with a component that already has zooming implemented - from my experience it would take a lot of investment to add proper zooming + panning to Silverlight Toolkit charts.
You should take a look at user610173's blog post. Specifically, download the full example code here: http://slchartzoomandpan.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets Very helpful!
Adding to Gergely Orozy comment about Telerik:
You can easily add the Zoom functionality with the following XAML.
<charting:ChartArea.ZoomScrollSettingsX>
<charting:ZoomScrollSettings ScrollMode="ScrollAndZoom" MinZoomRange="0.005"/>
</charting:ChartArea.ZoomScrollSettingsX>
You can check out a demo by clicking here and the source code is also available on that same tab.
I've been looking into Silverlight charting controls to display a large number of samples, (~10,000 data points in five separate series - ~50k points all up).
I have found the existing options produced by Dundas, Visifire, Microsoft etc to be extremely poor performers when displaying more than a few hundred data points.
I believe the performance issues with existing chart controls is caused by the heavy use of vector graphics.
Ergo one solution would be a client-side chart control that uses the WritableBitmap class to generate a raster chart.
Before I fall too far down the wheel re-invention rabbit hole - has anyone found a third party or OSS control that will manage large numbers of data points on a sparkline?
Check out Visiblox ( http://www.visiblox.com/ ) Charts. I'm working on a telemetry application at the minute which uses three of their charts in the same Silverlight component, plotting about 36,000 points in total, and there is very little slowdown in terms of performance, if any at all.
They have a high performance example on their website here - http://www.visiblox.com/examples/LargeDataSets. I chose to use Visiblox after loooking at the following blog post:
New performance comparison: http://www.visifire.com/blog/2011/12/02/fast-silverlight-charts/
Old performance comparison: http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/blog/colin/2010/12/visiblox-visifire-dynamicdatadisplay-charting-performance-comparison/
My telemetry example is now part of a CodeProject article that I have created, if you want to take a look!
Based on the recommendations here, I have just trialled Visiblox and Infragistics.
Visiblox has a good developer experience, clean APIs, no bloat. While the performance is OK for a few thousand datapoints, performance breaks down as you go into the 100k range. Here's the Visiblox sample with a few thousand points (you can download the sample and just tweak the number of datapoints).
Now, the common argument here is that you should not bind that much data to a chart anyway, but should do some trimming beforehand. I do agree with that, but ideally, I want a chart control that does take care of that for me. Getting Zooming, Panning and all that right are non-trivial tasks and I'd be happy to shell out a few 100$ to get that functionality. It's plain economic common sense to not reinvent the wheel here.
Infragistics certainly gets that right. I can bind a million odatapoints and get smooth peformance. Here's the Infragistics sample.
However, Infragistics installs a lot of junk (a local IIS web app with the samples you can also see online) and besides the (excellent) samples and the code-level documentation, I do miss some high-level introduction to each component and it's individual modules.
Since a lot of people on SO recommend Telerik controls for their clean APIs, Documentation and Developer Support, I did also take a look at their chart control. However, I must admit I find it rather slow (Zooming takes roughly 500-1000ms, which is too long to feel smooth).
Here's the Telerik sample.
Visifire is the fastest chart now. Check out the blog link below.
http://www.visifire.com/blog/2011/12/02/fast-silverlight-charts/
The Chart image says Visifire is 3 to 4x faster than Visiblox..!
Before you start playing around with WritableBitmap on your own take a look at WriteableBitmapEx from René Schulte, he blogs about it here. Awesome stuff.
I don't know of any OSS or 3rd party controls that'll do what you need.
The one case where I've had the need for 100K+ of datapoints, we made it work by keeping it simple. The biggest perf killer was the number of elements within each datapoint. By keeping the element a simple ellipse with a static brush fill the app was rather snappy.
Infragistics claims to be able to handle massive amounts of data in their recently released xamDataChart.
http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage/silverlight/data-visualization/xam-web-data-chart.aspx#Overview
I believe the Telerik sample you are looking for can be found here. It shows large amounts of data that you can actually zoom in/out of. They also have a Server Load "Performance" Demo as well. Here is an example of the Scatter Chart with hundreds of data points.
Have you looked at the Telerik charting controls? Here is a link to one of their demos where they are using 100.000 data points:
http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#Chart/Sampling
I should also mention that I have not used the charting controls myself, so I cannot vouch for them. But the demos look good to me.
EDIT:
The link above has gone stale. Here is a link to the latest incarnation of the Telerik charting control They call it ChartView now:
http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#ChartView/FirstLook
Im working on a middle size project, using WPF. Need DataGrid, suitable for the client: fast, customizable, beautiful. Which component suite do you suggest from your practice?(for example Devexpress's, telerik's, Infragistics's and etc)
I have used Telerik data grid in the past and it seemed to have the least hastles for me compared to others I have had a look at.
However I can pretty much put my money on it that someone else would feel that Telerik's control wasn't great and that Infragistics was better etc. - so I suggest that you maybe download the trials and test them for your specific scenario.
"Fast, customizable, beautiful." - try Xceed's (I work there), there's a no-install XBAP demo. Also supports asynchronous data virtualization and smooth scrolling and other stuff no other datagrid does.
Xceed DataGrid for WPF main page
XBAP demos page
I've been evaluating Xceed for a few weeks now and while it is powerful it's dog slow when placed in a tab control switching between tabs. 30 seconds to open a tab on a large data set. The forum on their website seems to suggest this is a known problem without resolution. Shame as in other aspects it appears to do a good job.
Which library to use for WPF?
Infragistics
ComponentOne
SyncFusions
ActiProSoftware
Telerik
#Reed - None of the Syncfusion WPF controls were ported from Windows Forms. With the grid control, most vendors use a simple ItemsControl based architecture. We have a much more elaborate infrastructure for highly optimized cell oriented rendering. This was implemented to achieve performance as close to Windows Forms performance as possible. The effort on our end to deliver this solution when contrasted with a pure ItemsControl based approach was at least 5x. We have a lot of customers using our Windows Forms controls in real-time scenarios and we wanted to give them the ability to move over to WPF without losing on the performance front. Our key controls offer excellent rendering performance even with millions of data points in direct contrast to solutions that are based on a simple ItemsControl based approach. Our controls often have a steeper adoption curve than others but in the long term we do believe that they are easier to maintain and update. Just my two cents:) Also, we are really keen to work with you on any issues that you are running into. Please let us know. My email is danielj(at)syncfusion.com.
#Tom - If you can send us feedback on the gauge we would greatly appreciate it. We are always looking for ways to improve and your feedback will be really useful.
Ultimately it depends on what you need. I think Syncfusion offers the widest and most actively deployed control suite on the WPF front. Disclaimer - I work for Syncfusion.
I work for a large firm which has long-term license agreement with Syncfusion so I had to use their products for years in pain.
I agree with Reed for Syncfusion's model. They converted their Winforms model (which has major bugs) to look it like WPF, I believe the whole suite is nothing to do with WPF, most of their controls cannot be controlled in XAML, you need to use code behind in order to style even simple things.
They are actually improving this to look more like WPF however with Syncfusion one issue is when you upgrade to a new version, it always breaks previous version based code. It is their marketing strategy and you spend weeks to figure out the new system.
One other issue with Syncfusion is they have quite poor documentation, their support is very weak, so you need to discover things on your own.
I used Telerik WPF in one project which is a much better choice, the performance is much better and the model is really easy to maintain.
We just started to buy DevExpress due to the pain of Syncfusion over years and I believe this is quite good WPF product. It is easy to use, they have really good support and nice documentation. The controls look very professional. First time I feel like I am using actual commercial .NET toolset.
*I do not work for DevExpress or Telerik.
They all have advantages and disadvantages.
Personally, I've found Telerik and Infragistics seemed more like they were designed specifically with WPF in mind.
Syncfusion's offering is more of a port of their Windows Forms product, so the design is more like they're other product lines.
That being said, each product you listed is good - and each have their own feature set. There is no substitute for trying a demo and seeing how you like working with the products in question.
I'm a fan of Component One, mainly based on personal taste.
ActiProSoftware have some good controls, but I find that they don't expose enough properties to make it easy to style and customize, though you can get around this with implicit styles.
Xceed have my favourite Grid control, lots of cool features and easy to work with.
I don't particularly like Telerik and I've never tried SyncFusion.
I would love to try Infragistics as that is one that I haven't tried, but have been really impressed with the demos. Does anyone have any comments on the architecture of Infragistics?
Like Reed said, they all have their advantages and disadvantages, but from my experiences I would recommend Component One.
HTH
None of the above, just use WPF Toolkit for DataGrid and VisualStateManager. It is not that hard to style the controls in WPF/Blend, plus it makes YOU more proficient and your code leaner.
P.S. Though, you might still use third-party reporting, since there no built in support for reporting in WPF.
If you are looking for a WPF Control Library there is the WpfDynamicUI Library.
It is an open source control building the user interface for the DataContext you provide.
It supports Charting, DataGrid, Map, Filtering, Paging, Nesting views and more...
Can be an alternative for building Line Of Business application.
PS: I am the coordinator of WpfDynamicUI