Presenting data in a graphical format always helps a lot in parsing the data efficiently. If the charts are interactive and linked, that's even better. Drill-down charts allow you to convert individual data plots (columns in column chart, pie slices in pie chart etc) of a chart into hotspots (or links). These items, when clicked, can open new charts and you can navigate between these charts easily.

They use the LinkedCharts feature of FusionCharts to make the graphs clickable. They set up a basic database-driven system that holds some randomly generated data for display. Full PHP and HTML are provided to create a simple chart like this where you can click into any of the bars for more detailed information. You can also download the full source or check out a demo.

I recently upgraded some of my Codeigniter applications that used OpenFlashCharts to using FusionCharts Free, and at the same time incorporated some javascript to allow me to change the graphs dynamically at the client-side. This has greatly improved the usability of my charts and graphs that I pump out. As such, I thought I would share how I did this and hopefully someone will find it useful as well.

He walks you through the steps needed to install - putting all of the files in the right places, creating a controller to use the scripts and a view to output the finished chart. A demo of the end result is also included.

We will create realtime chart data update that reflect to price fluctuation. There is a line type chart to visualize the price fluctuation. The data of price fluctuation will be fetched from database every 5 seconds using Ajax call and then display the latest 5 (five) data to the chart without any page refresh.

Using FusionCharts and Prototype, they show how to pull information out of a backend MySQL database into a basic graph (HTML and Javascript provided) with a periodic update that grabs the latest from the backend PHP script and pushes it to the graph. You can see an example of the graph here.