Differentiating lines in chart - c#

I'm wondering if there is a way to differentiate multiple lines in a chart (using Windows Forms Chart) through means other than different colors. In Excel you can make small triangles or other shapes appear on different lines in a graph, and I was wondering if you could do something similar in C# for sets of 3 or more lines.

You can change the shape of the marker (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.datavisualization.charting.markerstyle(v=vs.110).aspx), for point-type charts:
chart1.Series["MySeries"].MarkerStyle = MarkerStyle.Square;
You can also set background colors and gradients / hatching (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.datavisualization.charting.chart.backgradientstyle(v=vs.110).aspx) for bar-type charts:
chart1.Series["MySeries"].BackGradientStyle = GradientStyle.DiagonalLeft;
You can also specify line thickness and/or style for line-type charts:
chart1.Series["MySeries"].BorderWidth = 4;
chart1.Series["MySeries"].BorderDashStyle = ChartDashStyle.Dash;

Related

Align multiple charts

I have seen this answer, but what happens if you have three charts? And in general, have n charts stacked one ontop of each other and you want the chart bodies (areas) to align with each other?
I would be satisfied to see a result for three charts, but a function that takes a list of charts and aligns them is the most useful.
Also, does this answer presume the charts already have all data in them? What if the data is added at runtime dynamically and you need to keep the charts aligned? The problem is the y-axis labels may change in size as new data appears ( a negative sign appears, or more decimal places, more digits, etc), pushing the chart body to the right, and therefore misligning them with other chart areas stacked above/below it.
Being able to assign a stable Y-axis label extent no matter how big the label gets goes along way to solving some of these problems. How is this done?
This should work, assuming charts is an array of all the charts -
var referenceR = charts
.OrderBy(c => c.ChartAreas[0].InnerPlotPosition.ToRectangleF().Width)
.FirstOrDefault();
foreach(var chart in charts)
{
chart.Left = referenceR.Left;
chart.Size = referenceR.Size;
var r = chart.ChartAreas[0].InnerPlotPosition.ToRectangleF();
chart.ChartAreas[0].InnerPlotPosition = new ElementPosition(referenceR.Left, r.Top, referenceR.Width, r.Height);
}
This solution worked. I realize it is not what I asked, but for now this seems to be the internal design of the chart control "promoted" for solving this sort of problem.
Instead of having three charts, I have one chart with three areas. Then solving the alignment issue is trivial:
chart1.ChartAreas["ChartArea2"].AlignWithChartArea = "ChartArea1";
chart1.ChartAreas["ChartArea3"].AlignWithChartArea = "ChartArea1";
And everything stays aligned beautifully as data is inserted in realtime.

Repositioning chart point label

I have a Chart control that contains multiple overlapping Line series like this:
As you can see, the labels of the intersection points of the lines overlap the lines themselves. I tried using the following to no avail:
intersectPoints.SmartLabelStyle.Enabled = true;
intersectPoints.SmartLabelStyle.IsMarkerOverlappingAllowed = false;
I'm pretty sure this is because MarkerOverlapping only applies to Markers in the series the label belongs to.
I'm looking for how to accomplish any one of several solutions:
1) Manually adjust x-y position of Point label
2) Increase opacity of label so that it appears "above" overlapping lines
3) Use some other SmartLabelStyle tool.
4) If no other solution is available, possibly overwriting the draw method for the chart?

How do I add a tooltip or overlay to a specific section of a chart?

I have a chart that displays several lines showing signal strengths over a frequency band.
Each chart is composed of one 'area' and four 'series'. On the parent form there are several graphs like the one shown below. All of them are created dynamically and will have different widths.
What I am trying to do is add a tooltip or annotation (or something) when the mouse hovers over a specific area of the chart as shown in the mockup below:
If the mouse moved to the other side of the chart a different channel number and frequency would be shown in a box surrounding that area of the chart.
It doesn't have to be exactly as shown in the mockup although an outline would be preferred in order to show the user how wide the channel is regardless of the waveform shown in that area at the time. For example, the waveform shown above might only be 8MHz wide but channel 1 itself might have an allocation that is 10MHz wide (the device varies its bandwidth based on its offered load.)
The X axis is MHz and a channel is defined in terms of MHz so it would be ideal to define the outline in terms of the X axis instead of pixels.
Also, note that this is a realtime chart that is updated up to 10 times per second. Therefore it would be best if the information was not required to be updated each time new data arrived.
I was able to combine a couple of items to make the following solution:
[credit LICEcap]
The highlight is a rectangle filled in the 'OnPaint' method of the chart control.
The text is a simple TextAnnotation that is applied during the mousemove event.
It took quite a bit of coordinate conversion to get all the pieces in the right spot - especially the text. I needed to convert between pixels, position and value.
The first conversion was to pixels in order to center the text using MeasureString. I then converted it from pixel location to X axis value and then needed to convert it to position since the annotation requires using 'position' coordinates. There is not a function to convert from pixels to position. There is a pixels to value and a value to position which is the way I went.
I don't claim this to be the best or even a proper way to do it but it works. If anyone else has a better solution or a way to improve my code please post.
Here's my code for positioning the text:
double temp = chart1.ChartAreas[0].AxisX.ValueToPixelPosition(Convert.ToDouble(ce.sChannelFrequency) * 1000);
using (System.Drawing.Graphics graphics = System.Drawing.Graphics.FromImage(new Bitmap(1, 1))) {
SizeF size = graphics.MeasureString(freq.Text, new Font("eurostile", 13, FontStyle.Bold, GraphicsUnit.Pixel));
temp -= (size.Width/2+10);
}
if (temp < 0) temp = 0;
temp = chart1.ChartAreas[0].AxisX.PixelPositionToValue(temp);
freq.X = chart1.ChartAreas[0].AxisX.ValueToPosition(temp);

ASP.NET Charting Control Transparency

I'm working with the ASP.NET Charting Library and I've got it generating a pie chart but I'm having a problem configuring it to generate the pie chart with semi-transparent slices. If you look at the image you'll see what I'm talking about. Of the 4 pie charts the top 2 and the bottom left chart have the pie slice transparency I'm talking about.
(source: scottgu.com)
What settings of the chart do I tweak to render the slices with a certain % of transparency?
Thanks!
Try assigning the color of the series to a color with alpha transparency, like so:
Chart1.Series(0).Color = Color.FromArgb(128, 255, 0, 0) //transparent red
Taken from this thread.
This the ultimate solution for both cases - one color per series or palette charts:
myChart.ApplyPaletteColors();
foreach (var series in myChart.Series)
{
foreach (var point in series.Points)
{
point.Color = Color.FromArgb(220, point.Color);
}
}
Try this:
Series["SeriesName"].Color = Color.FromArgb(180, Color.Blue);
Where 180 defines the "transparency level", which must be between 0 to 255.
You can use semi transparent palettes.
Refer to:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/alexgor/2009/10/06/setting-microsoft-chart-series-colors/
Solution for color per serie and even for transparent palette:
Chart1.Series(0).Color = Color.FromArgb(200, Chart1.Series(0).Color)

Multiple colors in a C# .NET label

I'm looking for a way to display multiple colors in a single C#/.NET label. E.g the label is displaying a series of csv separated values that each take on a color depending on a bucket they fall into. I would prefer not to use multiple labels, as the values are variable length and I don't want to play with dynamic layouts. Is there a native support for this?
There is no native control in .NET that does this. Your best bet is to write your own UserControl (call it RainbowLabel or something). Normally you would have a custom label control inherit directly from Label, but since you can't get multi-colored text in one label, you would just inherit from UserControl.
For rendering the text, your UserControl could split the text on commas and then dynamically load a differently-colored Label for each chunk. A better way, however, would be to render the text directly onto your UserControl using the DrawString and MeasureString methods in the Graphics namespace.
Writing UserControls in .NET is really not difficult, and this kind of unusual problem is exactly what custom UserControls are for.
Update: here's a simple method you can use for rendering the multi-colored text on a PictureBox:
public void RenderRainbowText(string Text, PictureBox pb)
{
// PictureBox needs an image to draw on
pb.Image = new Bitmap(pb.Width, pb.Height);
using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(pb.Image))
{
// create all-white background for drawing
SolidBrush brush = new SolidBrush(Color.White);
g.FillRectangle(brush, 0, 0,
pb.Image.Width, pb.Image.Height);
// draw comma-delimited elements in multiple colors
string[] chunks = Text.Split(',');
brush = new SolidBrush(Color.Black);
SolidBrush[] brushes = new SolidBrush[] {
new SolidBrush(Color.Red),
new SolidBrush(Color.Green),
new SolidBrush(Color.Blue),
new SolidBrush(Color.Purple) };
float x = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < chunks.Length; i++)
{
// draw text in whatever color
g.DrawString(chunks[i], pb.Font, brushes[i], x, 0);
// measure text and advance x
x += (g.MeasureString(chunks[i], pb.Font)).Width;
// draw the comma back in, in black
if (i < (chunks.Length - 1))
{
g.DrawString(",", pb.Font, brush, x, 0);
x += (g.MeasureString(",", pb.Font)).Width;
}
}
}
}
Obviously this will break if you have more than 4 comma-delimited elements in your text, but you get the idea. Also, there appears to be a small glitch in MeasureString that makes it return a width that is a couple pixels wider than necessary, so the multi-colored string appears stretched out - you might want to tweak that part.
It should be straightforward to modify this code for a UserControl.
Note: TextRenderer is a better class to use for drawing and measuring strings, since it uses ints. Graphics.DrawString and .MeasureString use floats, so you'll get off-by-a-pixel errors here and there.
Update: Forget about using TextRenderer. It is dog slow.
You could try using a RichTextBox so that you can get multiple colors for the string and then make it read only and remove the border. Change the background color to the same as the Form it is on and you might get away with it.
As an alternative, you might do this as rtf or html in a suitable control (such as WebBrowser). It would probably take a bit more resources that you'd ideally like, but it'll work fairly quickly.
If you are building your Windows app for people with XP and up, you can use WPF. Even if it's a Windows Forms app, you can add a WPF UserControl.
I would then use a Label, and set the "Foreground" property to be a gradient of colors.
Or, in Windows Forms (no WPF), you could just use a "Flow Panel", and then in a for loop add multiple Labels as segments of your sentense... they will all "flow" together as if it was one label.
I'm using colored labels quite often to mark keywords in red color etc.
Like in Phil Wright's answer I use a RichTextBox control, remove the border and set the background color to SystemColors.Control.
To write colored text the control is first cleared and then I use this function to append colored text:
private void rtb_AppendText(Font selfont, Color color, Color bcolor,
string text, RichTextBox box)
{
// append the text to the RichTextBox control
int start = box.TextLength;
box.AppendText(text);
int end = box.TextLength;
// select the new text
box.Select(start, end - start);
// set the attributes of the new text
box.SelectionColor = color;
box.SelectionFont = selfont;
box.SelectionBackColor = bcolor;
// unselect
box.Select(end, 0);
// only required for multi line text to scroll to the end
box.ScrollToCaret();
}
If you want to run this function with "mono" then add a space before every new colored text, or mono will not set new the color correctly. This is not required with .NET
Usage:
myRtb.Text = "";
rtb_AppendText(new Font("Courier New", (float)10),
Color.Red, SystemColors.Control, " my red text", myRtb);
rtb_AppendText(new Font("Courier New", (float)10),
Color.Blue, SystemColors.Control, " followed by blue", myRtb);
Slightly off topic ... You could check also:
generate html color table
model colors in sql
the result
You can simply use multiple labels. Set the font properties you want and then use the left. top and width properties to display the words you want displayed differently. This is assuming you are using windows forms.
Try this,
labelId.Text = "Successfully sent to" + "<a style='color:Blue'> " + name + "</a>";
There is no native support for this; you will either have to use multiple labels or find a 3rd-party control that will provide this functionality.
I don't think so. You should create one yourself.
As per your Question your requirement is simple like
lable.Text = "This color is Red", So it have to display text like this
"The color is" will be in Blue and "Red" will be red color ..
This can be done like this
lable.Text = "<span style='Color:Blue'>" + " The color is " +"</span>" + "<span style='Color:Red'>"Red"</span>"

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