Display Graph in ASP.NET MVC

Introduction

In this article we will learn some basics of ASP.Net MVC applications. In my last article you read a lot about ASP.Net MVC. You can read those articles from the links given below.

1. ASP.NET MVC Basics: Part 1
    
2. ASP.NET MVC Basics: Part 2
    
3. ASP.NET MVC Basics: Part 3
    
4. Routing in MVC

After reading the previous articles I think you are now aware of ASP.Net MVC. So let's see some basic structures of ASP.Net MVC applications. In this article we will see how to start an ASP.Net MVC application. What are the prerequisites? And Simple Graph in ASP.Net MVC?

Prerequisites

As you know ASP.Net MVC is available in various versions like MVC1, MVC2, and MVC3 etc. In this article we are using MVC3. So download the MVC3 from here.

Starting an ASP.Net MVC Application

After installing ASP.Net MVC3 we can create our new ASP.Net MVC3 application so let's open your Visual Studio and select ASP.NET MVC3 Web Application from the new project dialog as shown in the following screenshot.



After selecting ASP.NET MVC3 Web Application it will display one more screen to select your view engine and type of application like empty website, Internet and Intranet so in this screen select Empty and in the view engine select aspx view engine; here we have one more view engine i.e. razor as well as we have one more advanced support to use HTML5 as markup language.



From the above screen we have to select Empty application and ASPX as our view engine as well check the chechbox to use HTML5 semantic markup. After this selection our application is created and the one predefined structure is available; just open the Solution Explorer and see the structure.



In the above screen you can see already some folders are created with Controllers, Models and Views. Now our task is create first one controller so let's create it by right-click and select add controller option which will ask the name of controller like shown in the following screen.



Here it's MVC standard for controller name. You can see I've added GraphController as the name for the controller you can change it as you want but keep in mind your controller name must be postfixed with the controller word. After adding this controller you can see the Default Index method is available in the controller and this GraphController is extended from the base Controller class.

public class GraphController : Controller
    {
        //
        // GET: /Graph/

        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            return View();
        }
}

From the above steps now you know how to create MVC applications and add the controller to the application. Next we have to add a view related to the methods present in the controller. So add one view for the index method to show on startup which will contain one ActionLink to display the graph. To add a view right-click in Method and select Add View as shown below.



From the above screen you see how to add a view to an ASP.NET MVC application. Now whenever we call any method then the respective view will be rendered in the client browser. You can keep the actionlink in the Index.aspx using the following line of code.

<%=Html.ActionLink("View Graph", "Graph")%>

In the above line you can see we have created a Html.ActionLink which takes View Graph and Graph as arguments; here View Graph is the text given to display and Graph is the action name in the controller. Next we will see how to prepare the graph; for this task we must add one more method in GraphController with the name Graph so copy and paste this method in GraphController.

public ActionResult Graph()
        {
            string[] _xval = { "vulpes", "Sp Nayak", "Krishna","Datta Kharad","Prabhu Raja" };
            string[] _yval =  { "235", "130", "30","25","15" };        
          //here the chart is going on
            var bytes = new Chart(width: 600, height: 300)
            .AddSeries(
            chartType: "Column",legend:"Mindcracker Current Month Runner up",
             xValue: _xval,
             yValues: _yval)
            .GetBytes("png");
            return File(bytes, "image/png");

        }

Before adding this method to the controller we need to add one using statement to System.Web.Helpers which contains the Chart. In the above method you can see we have created a string[] which is nothing but the data for our graph and we have created a chart which will take some arguments like charttype, legend and the values to display on the graph and this method will return File of bytes.

Configure Routing

When we create any MVC application our default routing is configured like bellow.

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
        {
            routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

            routes.MapRoute(
                "Default", // Route name
                "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
            );

        }

Here it will consider the default controller as Home but since this is an empty application we don't have a Home controller in our application so we need to change this default Home controller with our Graph controller so just change Home to Graph like below.

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
        {
            routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

            routes.MapRoute(
                "Default", // Route name
                "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Graph", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
            );

        }

Output

The output will look like the followong screen.



Conclusion

In this way we can start working on ASP.Net MVC and easily prepare the Graph for a MVC application.