Panning on Chart component

Hi!

I actually have two questions:

1)How to set my chart to allow panning instead of zoom through selection (which seems to be the default behavior)

2) In the case of having series plotted on the graph with a big difference in magnitude (thousands x hundred billions) is there a easy way to accommodate both series on the chart and make sure they are visible? (considering that if the one with the one with low valued data might be too small to be visible on the chart)

Thanks

Hello tulio

1) In order for the chart to be panned, it must first be zoomed in at least a little bit. If you want panning but not zooming, you can set ZoomMode to None and then programmatically zoom the chart by setting the ActualMinimum and ActualMaximum properties. Panning is always enabled and can be done using Ctrl+mouse drag. There currently isn't a way to change panning to work without holding Ctrl. If you need this option, let me know and I'll add it in for you.

2) If the 2 charts have very different Y values, then the most common way to plot them on the same chart is to have multiple Y axes. You can add another Y axis by adding a ChartAxis to the Chart.AlternativeYAxes collection property. Make sure to set the Title property of this ChartAxis. Then, on the DataSeries that you want to plot against the alternative axis, set the YAxisTitle property to be the same as the Title that you set. Series that don't have YAxisTitle set will plot against the standard Y axis. You can use a similar technique for X axes if you need to. You can see a working example of alternative axes in the Sample Explorer app that is installed with WPF Elements. Go to Charts -> Features -> Alternate Axes.

Let me know if you have further questions about these.

Jason Fauchelle

That actually worked for me, but I have another question/request:

1) In the case of having two different series with a big difference in their scale, on the same axes, is it possible to make the series with the smaller scale more "noticeable" ?

As for UX reasons, sometimes is hard for the user to figure out where to zoom-in in order to visualize a series.

Thanks

Hello tulio

For 2 charts with very different scales on the same axes, I'm not sure what the common approach is, but one thing you could do is display symbols (such as circles or diamonds) at each point, or/and you could increase the thickness of the line on the smaller series.

Enabling symbols can be done by setting the SymbolStyle property of the series, customizing the thickness (and other aspects of the line) can be done by setting the LineStyle property of the series. There are examples of doing this in the Sample Explorer app. Let me know if you have questions about this or if you have other ides of how you'd want to make the series more noticeable.

Jason Fauchelle

Hi Jason,

For this specific case, it seems to be more a problem of the axis line overriding the series line. As if the series line is behind the axis line.

For example, with the same data, this is how the series are plotted on a different component (PlotSPE01PSD.jpg)

The same data plotted with MindScape can be seen in figure 2 (Mindscape.JPG)

Is there a way to make the series line to be on top of the axis line?

Thanks

Hello tulio

Thanks for posting the images. In the next nightly build, you can set the IsChartClipped property to false to cause lines to be rendered above the axes. The next nightly build will be available 11 hours from now: http://www.mindscapehq.com/products/wpfelements/nightly-builds

This may only show a 1 pixel line though. To improve the visibility of the line, you can also make the axis line color more subtle by setting the AxisLineStyle property of the X axis. You could increase the thickness of the line, or you could set the padding of both Y axes to be 0,0,0,1 which will push the data rendering up 1 pixel.

Jason Fauchelle