Simon Taylor - .Net developer, Cheltenham

My record of coding problems solved and new things discovered

sharpcoder.co.uk available in 14 different languages!!!

clock June 14, 2009 18:44 by author Simon
Microsoft have created a translator widget (see right) that I have added to this site which allows readers to translate the text on the site, from English into 13 other lanuages. Guy Smith-Ferrier gives a very good description of what it does, how to get it and how to use it.


T-SQL cursor: infinite loop

clock May 21, 2009 13:54 by author Simon

What is wrong with the T-SQL below that a colleague of mine wrote?More...



A Stacked Bar Chart Silverlight control

clock May 3, 2009 11:01 by author Simon

EDIT: The Silverlight Toolkit now includes a stacked bar chart. A great blog post about it can be found on Delay's blog.

The Silverlight Toolkit provides developers and designers with a whole host of different controls that don't come as standard. Amongs other things it contains charting controls for creating bar charts, pie charts and line graphs etc. I recently had a requirement for a stacked bar chart which unfortunately is one of the few types of chart that isn't supported out of the box. However, after reading a series of posts written by Jafar Husain and taking a look at the toolkit source code I realised that I could create a stacked bar chart relatively easily myself - despite having only limited knowledge of Silverlight. At this point I have to appologise to Jafar - I asked his advice via his blog and he responded with a very comprehensive description of how he would go about tackling this problem. Jafar's approach would have produced a much more complete and flexible solution however, it was overkill for what I needed and I had to get something put together as quickly as possible, so I took an (arguably) more hacky approach.

The approach I took was to create a new StackedColumnSeries which was a total copy of the System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Charting.ColumnSeries class. At this point it would have been great to have been able to use ColumnSeries as the base class for StackedColumnSeries, but because ColumnSeries is sealed I had to copy and paste instead. I had to copy and paste various other chunks of code from the toolkit as well, to get my copy of ColumnSeries to compile since various helper classes etc were internal. If you download the code you will see that I've clearly commented which bits of code I've copied, so if the toolkit team open up their code a bit more in the future it will be straight forward to change the StackedColumnSeries class.

Once the StackedColumnSeries class was compiling and functioning like the ColumnSeries I needed to make changes to just two methods to make it function like a stacked column chart. The methods that I changed were UpdateDataPoint(DataPoint dataPoint) so that columns could be rendered so that they appear stacked on top of each other and GetValueMargins(IValueMarginConsumer consumer) so that I could increase the range of values that appear on the axis taking into account the fact that the maximum value that needed to be displayed now needed to be the sum of the stacked columns.

The two changed methods are below - please see the comments in the code for the changes that I needed to make to the code that I copied from the ColumnSeries.

        /// <summary>
        /// Updates each point.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="dataPoint">The data point to update.</param>

        protected override void UpdateDataPoint(DataPoint dataPoint)
        {
            if (SeriesHost == null || PlotArea == null)
            {
                return;
            }

            object category = dataPoint.IndependentValue ?? (this.ActiveDataPoints.IndexOf(dataPoint) + 1);
            Range<UnitValue> coordinateRange = GetCategoryRange(category);
            if (!coordinateRange.HasData)
            {
                return;
            }
            else if (coordinateRange.Maximum.Unit != Unit.Pixels || coordinateRange.Minimum.Unit != Unit.Pixels)
            {
                throw new InvalidOperationException("This Series Does Not Support Radial Axes");
            }

            double minimum = (double)coordinateRange.Minimum.Value;
            double maximum = (double)coordinateRange.Maximum.Value;

            double plotAreaHeight = ActualDependentRangeAxis.GetPlotAreaCoordinate(ActualDependentRangeAxis.Range.Maximum).Value.Value;
            IEnumerable<StackedColumnSeries> columnSeries = SeriesHost.Series.OfType<StackedColumnSeries>().Where(series => series.ActualIndependentAxis == ActualIndependentAxis);
            int numberOfSeries = columnSeries.Count();
            double coordinateRangeWidth = (maximum - minimum);
            double segmentWidth = coordinateRangeWidth * 0.8;

            // For stacked chart, no need to scale the width of the columns if there are more series

            double columnWidth = segmentWidth; // / numberOfSeries;
            int seriesIndex = columnSeries.IndexOf(this);

            double dataPointY = ActualDependentRangeAxis.GetPlotAreaCoordinate(ValueHelper.ToDouble(dataPoint.ActualDependentValue)).Value.Value;
            double zeroPointY = ActualDependentRangeAxis.GetPlotAreaCoordinate(ActualDependentRangeAxis.Origin).Value.Value;

            // Need to shift the columns up to take account of the other columns that are already rendered, to make them

            // appear stacked
            int dataPointIndex = ActiveDataPoints.IndexOf(dataPoint);

            for (int i = numberOfSeries - 1; i > seriesIndex; i--)
            {
                StackedColumnSeries prevSeries = columnSeries.ElementAt<StackedColumnSeries>(i);

                if (prevSeries.ActiveDataPointCount >= dataPointIndex + 1)
                {
                    double yOffset = ActualDependentRangeAxis.GetPlotAreaCoordinate(ValueHelper.ToDouble(prevSeries.ActiveDataPoints.ElementAt<DataPoint>(dataPointIndex).ActualDependentValue)).Value.Value;

                    dataPointY += yOffset;
                    zeroPointY += yOffset;
                }
            }

            // No offset for stacked bar charts so that all the columns line up

            double offset = 0; /*seriesIndex * Math.Round(columnWidth) + coordinateRangeWidth * 0.1;*/
            double dataPointX = minimum + offset;

            if (GetIsDataPointGrouped(category))
            {
                // Multiple DataPoints share this category; offset and overlap them appropriately
                IGrouping<object, DataPoint> categoryGrouping = GetDataPointGroup(category);
                int index = categoryGrouping.IndexOf(dataPoint);
                dataPointX += (index * (columnWidth * 0.2)) / (categoryGrouping.Count() - 1);
                columnWidth *= 0.8;
                Canvas.SetZIndex(dataPoint, -index);
            }

            if (ValueHelper.CanGraph(dataPointY) && ValueHelper.CanGraph(dataPointX) && ValueHelper.CanGraph(zeroPointY))
            {
                // Remember, the coordinate 0,0 is in the top telft hand corner, therefore the "top" y coordinate is going to

                // be a smaller value than the bottom.
                double left = Math.Round(dataPointX);
                double width = Math.Round(columnWidth);

                double top = Math.Round(plotAreaHeight - Math.Max(dataPointY, zeroPointY) + 0.5);
                double bottom = Math.Round(plotAreaHeight - Math.Min(dataPointY, zeroPointY) + 0.5);
                double height = bottom - top + 1;

                Canvas.SetLeft(dataPoint, left);
                Canvas.SetTop(dataPoint, top);
                dataPoint.Width = width;
                dataPoint.Height = height;
            }
        }

        /// <summary>

        /// Returns the value margins for a given axis.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="consumer">The axis to retrieve the value margins for.
        /// </param>
        /// <returns>A sequence of value margins.</returns>

        protected override IEnumerable<ValueMargin> GetValueMargins(IValueMarginConsumer consumer)
        {
            double dependentValueMargin = this.ActualHeight / 10;
            IAxis axis = consumer as IAxis;
            if (axis != null && ActiveDataPoints.Any())
            {
                Func<DataPoint, IComparable> selector = null;
                if (axis == InternalActualIndependentAxis)
                {
                    selector = (dataPoint) => (IComparable)dataPoint.ActualIndependentValue;

                    DataPoint minimumPoint = ActiveDataPoints.MinOrNull(selector);
                    DataPoint maximumPoint = ActiveDataPoints.MaxOrNull(selector);

                    double minimumMargin = minimumPoint.GetMargin(axis);
                    yield return new ValueMargin(selector(minimumPoint), minimumMargin, minimumMargin);

                    double maximumMargin = maximumPoint.GetMargin(axis);
                    yield return new ValueMargin(selector(maximumPoint), maximumMargin, maximumMargin);
                }
                else if (axis == InternalActualDependentAxis)
                {
                    // Some up the total value of the current set of columns

                    double valueTotal = 0.0;

                    foreach (DataPoint dataPoint in ActiveDataPoints.AsEnumerable<DataPoint>())
                    {
                        valueTotal += (double)dataPoint.ActualDependentValue;
                    }
                    // The minimum value always needs to be 0 for stacked column charts
                    yield return new ValueMargin(0.0, dependentValueMargin, dependentValueMargin);
                    yield return new ValueMargin(valueTotal, dependentValueMargin, dependentValueMargin);
                }
            }
            else

            {
                yield break;
            }
        }

The resut of running this code and and binding some data to the chart can be shown below (notice I have also added a line series).

Staked Bar Chart

NOTE: It has come to my attention that there are a couple of minor bugs with this solution, for example some parts of the chart don't lose their selected state. Unfortunately, as the control met my requirements, it is unlikely that I am going to get chance to investigate these bugs now. Hopefully, the information in the post above is detailed enough to show people how I arrived at my solution and be a good starting point for debugging and fixing any problems.



IronPython - a configuration language

clock April 8, 2009 19:35 by author Simon

I had a requirement to create a state machine for a product at work. The product is a project management tool and therefore has the concept of a job which based on the users actions moves from one state to another. There was also the additional requirement that the state machine should be configurable by/for different customers. Esentially, the state machine is a large flow diagram but the implementation needed to allow for completely ripping up the first customers flow diagram and replacing it with a completely different one for the next customer.More...



Infragistics UltraGrid - problem setting text at runtime

clock March 21, 2009 16:04 by author Simon
I had a requirement to create a number of forms which were all basically the same except for the text displayed in the labels. Rather than create what was essentially the same form over and over again, I decided to put the text for the labels in my database and set the text at runtime. This was quite straight forward to implement, however when the forms were displayed, the controls that were all perfectly lined up at design time were no longer in line. More...


Integrating with Microsoft Project Server 2007

clock March 10, 2009 08:22 by author Simon

Integrating with project server is as simple as adding a number of web references and calling the right web methods. For more information on the web services available, consult the SDK.More...



Interfacing with exchange : Part 5

clock March 9, 2009 09:20 by author Simon

This post includes code for setting permissions on public folders. It works by obtaining the xml describing the existing permissions and then using that as the basis of the xml sent with a PROPPATCH WebDAV command to udate the permissions. I found it very difficulty to find documentation that described how to put together the xml for all of the problems in this series of posts, but especially when I wanted to set permissions on folders - there are rules about the order that ACE's appear in the cml document etc. Fortunately I came across the PFDAVAdmin tool which helped considerably.More...



Interfacing with Exchange : Part 4

clock February 28, 2009 16:29 by author Simon

To move an item in a public folder you need to send a MOVE WebDav command together with the URI of the item to move - the destination URI should be added to the request as a HTTP header. The following code moves the contents of one folder to another by searching for all of the items in the source folder and looping through them and moving them one at a time to the destination folder.More...



Interfacing with Exchange : Part 3

clock February 28, 2009 16:18 by author Simon

Below is the code for creating a public folder in exchange. Basically you need to send a MKCOL WebDav command to the server together with xml to set further options such as whether or not to enable email for the folder.More...



Interfacing with Exchange : Part 2

clock February 26, 2009 19:47 by author Simon

If Outlook Web Access (OWA) is enabled you simply need to send a HTTP request to the server at the URL http://<server>/exchweb/bin/auth/owaauth.dll, passing the username and password as parameters. If authentication is succesful, two cookies will be returned with the response which should be stored and passed with subsequent requests to the server:More...



About the author

Simon is currently living and working in Toronto, Canada as a software consultant for Infusion. He is primarily a .Net developer although sometimes has to turn his hand to other technologies such as Java and flex. Simon has also recently started iPhone application development. Contact me.

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