Time for action — downloading and extracting FusionCharts

1. 1. Go to http://www.fusioncharts.com/download and fill in your particulars in the download form and click on Download.

2. 2. On the next page, you will find links to either download the entire FusionCharts Suite, or individual products from the suite. In this chapter, we will work with FusionCharts XT only and hence will explore that.

3. 3. Once the ZIP file has been downloaded, extract it to a folder on your hard drive, which is conveniently located at C:\FusionChartsSuite\FusionChartsXT on Windows or Users/{YourName}/FusionChartsSuite/FusionChartsXT on Mac or UNIX based systems. Throughout this book, we will refer to this folder as the FusionCharts Installation Folder.

   Note

   The steps to install and use FusionCharts remain the same, whether you are using the trial or licensed version.

What just happened?

You have now successfully downloaded FusionCharts XT and extracted it in the FusionCharts Installation Folder. We will soon learn how to use these files to build charts. Before that, let us quickly explore the contents of the FusionCharts package.

Within the FusionCharts Installation Folder, you will find multiple folders. Some of the folders are internal folders used to store documentation and gallery files, for example, Contents, Gallery, and so on. The folders that you will mostly use are Charts, Code, SourceCode, ExportHandlers, and the Tools folder for the following purpose:

Folder Name	What it contains?
Charts	Contains all the SWF and JS files that form the core of FusionCharts we will refer to it as Core FusionCharts files. The FusionCharts SWF files have been created using Adobe Flash 8 and need Flash Player 8 (or above) to run. The JavaScript is compatible with IE6 (or above), Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari, including that on iPads and iPhones.
Code	Consists of code samples in various programming languages that you can explore, to quickly learn or get started with.
SourceCode	Present only with the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus license, this folder contains the source code of FusionCharts in both Flash Source files (.fla) and JavaScript files.
Tools	Consists of utility applications in three subfolders: FCDataConverter helps you convert the FusionCharts XML data to JSON data and vice versa. We will explore this later in the chapter, after we have created our first chart. FlashPlayerSecuritySetup contains scripts that help you configure security settings on your local machine only when using FusionCharts with JavaScript. We will explore this later in the book when we build advanced examples of FusionCharts integrated with JavaScript. XMLGenerator is a visual interface to generate XML data for FusionCharts. This is primarily intended for non developers and would not be of much help to us.

The FusionCharts Installation Folder also contains three files in the root folder:

Filename	What it contains?
FusionCharts License Agreement.rtf	Contains the license agreement that governs the usage of FusionCharts. You may want to read through it before using FusionCharts.
Version.txt	Contains the detailed version history of FusionCharts XT.
Index.html	The main page that you use to start exploring the FusionCharts package.

When you run Index.html, you will see a page similar to the following screenshot:

When you click on the Documentation link, it opens the documentation for FusionCharts XT, as shown in the following screenshot:

This documentation is an exhaustive resource for FusionCharts including sections for beginners, chart parameter lists, API references, and sections on advanced charting. In this book, we will not repeat, but rather refer to the APIs and parameters explained in the documentation.

From Index.html, you can also explore all the chart types present in FusionCharts XT by clicking on Chart Gallery. It presents a list of chart types and multiple examples for each, as shown in the following screenshot. We recommend you spend some time exploring this, as this is a good learning resource to get a real-world feel of the charts and understand what you can create once you are familiar with FusionCharts.

The Live Demos section, accessible from Index.html, lets you explore sample dashboards and examples created using FusionCharts—both offline and online.

Now that you have had a taste of what FusionCharts can do for you, it is time to create your own chart, your first chart using FusionCharts.