Huddled Masses
Posts Tagged ‘Charts’
January 16th, 2009 | 
Author: Once I started playing with the new ability, introduced in PowerBoots 0.0.4 to easily add support for new graphical controls to PowerBoots, I found all sorts of fun widgets out there in open-source land. I’ll write about a few of them in the future, but for now I’m just going to stick with Visifire. After playing with a few examples, I finally got around to actually trying to create the graphs I needed at work which were the main source of motivation for trying to do Visifire from PowerShell anyway …
The problem was, half of the need we have for graphs is to throw them up on a web-server … so I needed a way to take the WPF window, and capture the controls and visuals as an image. Basically, render the WPF control to a bitmap image, instead of to the screen. To cut a long story short, I figured it out of course — why else would I be writing this? (get it here).
Out-BootsImage
So the new version of PowerBoots includes the Out-BootsImage function (aliased as BootsImage and “obi”), which basically is designed to take the filename of an image, and a boots visual element, and create a screenshot. It can generate bmp, gif, jpg, png, tiff, and even Microsoft’s new wdp format, or it can output to clipboard.
It’s late, so I’m not going to write any more about this … the bottom line is, if you have been looking for a (free) way to generate graphs and charts to image files in PowerShell, this will work for you: go grab Visifire, check out their gallery for inspiration, and start churning out graphs! Just for fun, here are the samples from the help documentation (except, this is the actual script I ran, including the upload code) with screen-shots …
Important note
When producing images of Visifire charts using this method, it is absolutely critical that you must specify -Animation $false because otherwise you will consistenly produce images of empty charts (since by default Visifire animates all of the bars onto the screen right after the SourceInitialized event that I use to capture the image). Oh, and if you need to remove the Visifire.com watermark, there is a -watermark $false parameter on the Chart element, which turns it off.
$credential = Get-Credential
Chart -Width 200 -Height 150 -Theme Theme3 -Watermark $false -Animation $false (
DataSeries $(
1..(Get-Random -min 3 -max 6) | ForEach-Object {
DataPoint -YValue (Get-Random 100)
}
)
) | Out-BootsImage VisiFire-BootsImage.jpg |ForEach-Object {
Send-FTP HuddledMasses.org $credential -LocalFile $_ -Remotefile "$imgPath/$($_.Name)"
[Windows.Clipboard]::SetText( "!http://huddledmasses.org/images/PowerBoots/$($_.Name)!" )
}
StackPanel -Margin "10,5,10,5" $(
Label "Please enter your name:"
StackPanel -Orientation Horizontal $(
TextBox -OutVariable global:textbox -Width 150 -On_KeyDown {
if($_.Key -eq "Return") {
Write-Output $textbox[0].Text
$BootsWindow.Close()
}
}
Button "Ok" -Padding "5,0,5,0" -Margin "2,0,0,0" -On_Click {
Write-Output $textbox[0].Text
$BootsWindow.Close()
}
)
) | Out-BootsImage BootsImage-Screenshot.jpg | ForEach-Object {
Send-FTP HuddledMasses.org $credential -LocalFile $_ -Remotefile "$imgPath/$($_.Name)"
[Windows.Clipboard]::SetText( "!http://huddledmasses.org/images/PowerBoots/$($_.Name)!" )
}
Posted in Huddled | 
Tags: Charting, Charts, Development, PowerBoots, PowerShell, Visifire, WPF | 
2 Comments »
This is the fourth release of the PowerBoots module for PowerShell 2 (Download – 7z). PowerBoots is a framework for creating WPF GUIs from PowerShell, and this latest release brings a couple of bug fixes and two new features.
Now with tab completion
The biggest change in PowerBoots 0.0.4 is that tab-completion for parameters works in the shell.
Behind the scenes what has happened is that I’ve discovered that in the current CTP3 release of PowerShell 2, Dynamic Parameter sets are not handled correctly for aliases, and the Get-Command for aliases of functions doesn’t return the same set of parameters as it does on the function itself. The result is that Tab-Completion for dynamic parameters doesn’t work on aliases (neither the built-in tab completion, nor MoW’s PowerTab). I wrote up a bug against that, but I also found that I can work around it by creating hundreds of functions (all pointed at the same script-block), instead of hundreds of aliases (all pointed at the same function).
PowerBoots produces functions instead aliases
This means the PowerBoots commands show up by default when you run Get-Command. Incidentally, this means that the first time you run Get-Command after you Import-Module PowerBoots you incur a huge penalty (17 seconds on my machine) while Get-Command caches all the dynamic parameter information about the functions. NOTE: because of the DynamicParam bug, I’ve ditched aliases altogether for this particular project and am generating two functions for each element/type in PowerBoots: the full New-Namespace.Type version, and a “Type” alias when possible. Trust me when I say: “it’s worth it” ... with the backing scriptblock, there’s virtually no difference between the two approches in terms of resources (other than the aforementions hit on Get-Command).
Now with more controls
The second big change (and the one which I hope will have the biggest long-term impact) is that you can now import your own WPF control libraries into PowerBoots. This means that you can, for example, go get the open source Visifire charting library, extract their WPFVisifire.Charts library into your PowerShell folder, and use it like so:
Add-BootsContentProperty 'DataPoints', 'Series'
Add-BootsFunction -Assembly "~\Documents\WindowsPowershell\Libraries\WPFVisifire.Charts.dll"
Chart -Width 200 -Height 150 -Theme Theme3 (
DataSeries $(
DataPoint -YValue (Get-Random 100)
DataPoint -YValue (Get-Random 100)
DataPoint -YValue (Get-Random 100)
DataPoint -YValue (Get-Random 100)
)
) | Boots -Title "Sample, Theme 3"