Time for action — getting ready to build dynamic charts

1. 1. Ensure that you have a ready application in PHP, ASP.NET, or JSP in which you want to use FusionCharts. For the sake of brevity, we will not cover how to create or set up a new application. You can use your choice of IDE for the application creation and coding.

2. 2. Create a new database (recommended) or use an existing database, which we will use to create dynamic charts. Next, download harrys_supermarket.sql which is present in the downloads of this book and execute the SQL scripts contained in this file against your database. This script creates just one table orders, having four columns, namely, order_id, cust_id, order_date, and order_amount, as shown in the following table:

   order_id	cust_id	order_date	order_amount
   476	692	2010-06-15	1134
   789	991	2011-05-24	5999
   1134	1250	2011-09-30	499
   ....	....	....	....

   The SQL script also populates the table with dummy data. We will use this table...