In v17.2 of our WinForms Charts, we’ve added some useful features that both of you, the developer, and your end-users might appreciate.
Criteria Based Filtering
The Chart control already supported filtering on series, but in this release we have replaced the DataFilter property with the FilterCriteria and FilterString properties. This makes filtering more powerful and is also inline with several other controls like the Grid, Reporting and XPO. It allows you to use the DevExpress Criteria Language to filter series.
It also allows you to use the FilterControl or the Filtering UI Context to select the data which is used by the Chart control without writing any code.
Because of this change, you can use one filter control which manages the data for a Grid as well as a Chart!
Bind a Chart to Grid data
In the previous releases you always needed to bind the data to a DataSource like a collection of objects or a DataReader. In scenarios which involve a grid and a chart, these DataSources where used by both controls. With custom unbound grid columns, grouping and filtering you always needed to code some additional mechanism to get that data in the chart as well.
With v17.2, we have added a ControlRowSource component which allows you to bind the chart directly to the Grid control. With this feature, the chart doesn’t use the same DataSource as the grid, but it will actually use the rows and columns available in the grid as its DataSource. It will make use of things like Grouping, Sorting, Filtering which might have been set in the Grid when supplying data to the Chart.
This also works in combination with the Treelist, Listbox and VerticalGrid controls.
Use a Chart as Grid Cell Editor
With v17.2 we implemented a long requested feature; Use a chart as Grid Cell Editor!
This gives you the possibility to design beautiful master-detail data visualizations as you can see:
This functionality is based on the RepositoryItemAnyControl class and is now possible because we have implemented the IAnyControlEdit interface on the Chart control.
Conclusion
With this release we’ve taken a big step in letting different controls make use of each others functionality. For you this means writing less code and better performance. This will result in an even better experience for your end-users.
Talking about performance and user experience; have you seen Julian’s blog post about that we’ve done with the XtraGrid in v17.2?