<CFCHART> inside <CFPRESENTATION>/<CFPRESENTATIONSLIDE>

Discussion in 'Programming' started by 137th Gebirg, Feb 16, 2012.

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  1. #1
    Hello all:

    Finally upgraded to CF9 for the purposes of building dynamic PowerPoint presentations. I'm almost there but one problem still blocks my way:

    When I try to call any kind of <CFCHART>, with even the simplest of hard-coded numbers and labels, located within a <CFPRESENTATION>/<CFPRESENTATIONSLIDE> tag series where the FORMAT parameter = "ppt" (PowerPoint), I get a box with a black "X" inside. I've run into this problem with images when accessing this routine in an SSL region of my site. I've since moved everything into a non-SSL directory structure - images now load correctly, but the chart still doesn't display. The other weird thing about this is if I set the FORMAT parameter to "html", everything works fine. The chart comes up and the slide looks perfect. There seems to be some kind of functional incongruity between how HTML pages are built and how PPT slides are built using the <CFPRESENTATION> tag and I'm curious if anyone knows what might be the reason for this. All the Adobe help pages show examples using <CFCHART> within <CFPRESENTATION> (although they don't specify "PPT" as the output format, interestingly), so I'm making an educated assertion that it should work.

    Any info appreciated - thanks much in advance!
     
    137th Gebirg, Feb 16, 2012 IP
  2. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Active Member

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    #2
    Has nobody used the "ppt" feature with CFCHARTS before? Interesting...
     
    137th Gebirg, Feb 22, 2012 IP
  3. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Active Member

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    Small update - I also attempted to change the charting cache location to a non-SSL directory. The charts save to the new location successfully but the problem still persists for PPT export - the images won't display. HTML output still works fine. Hoping someone has used this before and knows what may be going wrong.
     
    137th Gebirg, Apr 24, 2012 IP
  4. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Active Member

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    Update & Solution: I have been given the answer on another forum and I figured I'd share this here as well. You can use CFCHART to create a PNG image which can be written to the disk and then display in the image in HTML code as you would any other image. Simply use the "NAME" attribute on the CFCHART tag. It will save the chart as binary data to the variable specified in the name attribute. You could then write it out to an image file and display with an <IMG ... /> tag.

    Example: <CFFILE ACTION="write" FILE="[explicitly defined file server path and name]" OUTPUT="#Variable from NAME attribute from CFCHART#">

    Works like a champ! :)
     
    137th Gebirg, May 9, 2012 IP