tassan / chartjscore

Implementation of Chart.js for use with .NET Core.

ChartJSCore v1.3.0

Implementation of Chart.js for use with .NET Core. This library allows Chart.js code to be generated in an MVC controller from a .NET object and injected into the desired view.

Installation

To use ChartJSCore in your C# project, you can either download the ChartJSCore C# .NET libraries directly from the Github repository or, if you have the NuGet package manager installed, you can grab them automatically.

• Nuget package: https://www.nuget.org/packages/ChartJSCore/

PM> Install-Package ChartJSCore

Once you have the ChartJSCore libraries properly referenced in your project, you can include calls to them in your code.

Add the following namespaces to use the library:

using ChartJSCore.Models;

Dependencies

This produces code for generating chart using Chart.js so Chart.js is required to render them, Chart.js also uses require.js so this is also needed. To install Chart.js using Bower on Visual Studio it is needed to update the registry in .bowerrc file, because the old heroku repository is deprecated as stated in here. Otherwise you can download it directly to the project root folder wwwroot\lib\Chart.js.

This package has been created and tested with version 2.4.0 of Chart.js, earlier versions may well be incompatible.

Require.js isn't available in the Bower package manager but can be added by directly updating the bower.json file.

{
  "name": "asp.net",
  "private": true,
  "dependencies": {
    "bootstrap": "3.3.7",
    "jquery": "3.1.1",
    "jquery-validation": "1.16.0",
    "jquery-validation-unobtrusive": "3.2.6",
    "requirejs": "2.3.3",
    "chart.js": "2.5.0"
  }
}

Usage

This is intended for usage in ASP.NET 5 Core MVC projects.

Once a project has been created a new Chart object can be created by using code similar to that below. In this example the Index method of the Home controller has been updated to generate a Chart and pass it through to the relevant view.

        public IActionResult Index()
        {
            Chart chart = new Chart();

            chart.Type = "line";

            ChartJSCore.Models.Data data = new ChartJSCore.Models.Data();
            data.Labels = new List<string>() { "January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June", "July" };

            LineDataset dataset = new LineDataset()
            {
                Label = "My First dataset",
                Data = new List<double>() { 65, 59, 80, 81, 56, 55, 40 },
                Fill = false,
                LineTension = 0.1,
                BackgroundColor = "rgba(75, 192, 192, 0.4)",
                BorderColor = "rgba(75,192,192,1)",
                BorderCapStyle = "butt",
                BorderDash = new List<int> { },
                BorderDashOffset = 0.0,
                BorderJoinStyle = "miter",
                PointBorderColor = new List<string>() { "rgba(75,192,192,1)" },
                PointBackgroundColor = new List<string>() { "#fff" },
                PointBorderWidth = new List<int> { 1 },
                PointHoverRadius = new List<int> { 5 },
                PointHoverBackgroundColor = new List<string>() { "rgba(75,192,192,1)" },
                PointHoverBorderColor = new List<string>() { "rgba(220,220,220,1)" },
                PointHoverBorderWidth = new List<int> { 2 },
                PointRadius = new List<int> { 1 },
                PointHitRadius = new List<int> { 10 },
                SpanGaps = false
            };

            data.Datasets = new List<Dataset>();
            data.Datasets.Add(dataset);

            chart.Data = data;

            ViewData["chart"] = chart;

            return View();
        }

See the test project for further examples.

Within the Index view the Chart can then be accessed and rendered.

@{
    ViewData["Title"] = "Home Page";
}

<div><canvas id="lineChart"></canvas></div>

@{ChartJSCore.Models.Chart chart = (ChartJSCore.Models.Chart)ViewData["chart"]; }

@section Scripts {
    <script src="~/lib/Chart.js/dist/Chart.js"></script>
    <script>
        @Html.Raw(chart.CreateChartCode("lineChart"));
    </script>
}

Plugins

As there's a large number of plugins available for Chart.js and it's not feasable to create object representations of them all I've added the "PluginDynamic" property to all chart objects to allow customisation. This is a Dictionary<string, object> in which the string is the name of the property and the object contains the object to be serialized, these will be added to the parent object as distinct properties.