Technical Introduction

CFXGraphicsServer has been built around the CFX API library that is supplied by Macromedia. It gives the ability to create special custom tags for ColdFusion. With the API it is possible to create just about anything you wish using C++.

Some History

The GraphicsServer engine has been OEM from Bits Per Second Ltd, a Brighton, UK based software company

Bits Per Second launched GraphicsServer in 1990, the first general-purpose graphing library for Windows. It rapidly became a market-leader, enabling developers to integrate presentation-quality graphs quickly and easily into applications created with tools like SQLWindows, FoxPro, C/C++, Visual Basic and Delphi. It is also included in products from Walldata and the well known Web analysis tool - Webtrends.

Licensing Graphics Server to OEMs has been a major factor in its success. Since 1991 Microsoft has licensed it for Visual Basic & Visual C++, and Gupta (now known as Centura) includes it in its Quest SQL database browser and its desktop application builder SQLWindows. In 1995 Borland chose the Bits Per Second Graph OLE control for inclusion in all its developer products (Paradox, Delphi and C++).

In 1999 CFXGraphicsServer Ltd. licensed GraphicsServer for CFXGraphicsServer, a new team comprising of an ex-member of the original GraphicsServer team has been working on the CFXGraphicsServer release.

CFX GraphicsServer Limited and TeraTech, Inc. http://www.teratech.com are pleased to announce that as of March, 2001, TeraTech, Inc. has acquired ownership of the rights to CFX GraphicsServer. All enquiries relating to CFX GraphicsServer should be directed to Michael Smith of TeraTech, Inc.

So how do you use CFXGraphicsServer? (technical overview)

We have created a new custom tag, the tag format looks something like the following:

<CFX_GraphicsServer QUERY="MyQuery" DB_DATASETS="figures" SET_LEGENDENTRIES="month" Graphtype="3" ...>

There are about 200 possible tag attributes for the CFXGraphicsServer, due to this large number of options we have to crete a advanced VTML control as an add-in Macromedia ColdFusion Studio

The core tags are tha ability to take data from the query, these are known as db_ attributers, these take field names from your query. It is also possible to use static data that has not been obtained from a database, these are called ST_ static attributes. After these core attributes you then have a number of styles, text settings etc

When the Tag is called, it talks to the GraphicsServer engine running on your machine, ir processors the request and returns a JPG or PNG.

CFXGraphicsServer also makes it possible to wrap around image maps for your graph, this is done automatically, so that it is possible to drill down on say a Pie Chart to another graph.

The HTML that is produced then looks something like below.

<img src="http://www.cfxgraphicsserver.com/gsimage/66.jpg" USEMAP="#gsmap66" WIDTH=550 HEIGHT=400 border=0>

You will notice that the file is saved to disk, this file remains cached for as long as it takes a setting in the administrator, default is set at 10. The file name is then incremented, when it reaches 10.jpg , it kills 1.jpg and creates 11.jpg file this solves the problem of the graphs staying cached. It might that under heavy load, 10 images per cache is not enough, you should set this higher to solve that problem.

There are a number of versions of GraphicsServer. The reason for this is to provide simple cheap access for the developer to code, while allowing the end result to pay a more reasonable cost.

What are the differences in the various versions?

The Developer version can only support localhost access ie. http://localhost/gsimage/1.jpg

The Professional version can only support a single domain, enough for most companies. http://www.mycompany.com/gsimage

The Enterprise / ISP versions allow you to have as many domains as you wish on any one machine