Adobe 38000827 - Macromedia ColdFusion MX Standard Edition Evaluator Manual page 31

Macromedia® ColdFusion® MX Evaluator's Guide
Enhanced Charting
ColdFusion 5 introduced the ColdFusion charting engine, an embedded service for
producing professional graphs and business charts from application data. ColdFusion MX
takes this feature to the next level by expanding the number and complexity of supported
charts, increasing the available formatting options, and enabling offline chart generation.
This release also introduces a more flexible syntax for creating charts from application
data.
In addition to bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs, ColdFusion MX now supports eight
additional chart types, including the ability to mix different types in the same chart (e.g.,
bar chart with overlaid line graph). Other new features include support for multiple data
series within a single chart as well as expanded functionality for enabling data drill-downs.
ColdFusion MX Charting
Finally, the charting engine now allows developers to use batch scheduling to save chart
images to disk. This is particularly useful for reports that do not need to access real-time
data or for high-volume applications. Frequently requested charts can be cached on disk
and refreshed every minute, hour, etc. This not only improves response time but also
reduces the load each request places on the server.
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