C1Chart Concepts and Main Properties

In order to create and format charts using the C1Chart control, it is useful to understand how the main properties map into chart elements. The diagram below illustrates this:

The steps involved in creating a typical chart are:

1.   Choose the chart type (ChartType property)
C1Chart supports about 30 chart types, including Bar, Column, Line, Area, Pie, Radial, Polar, Candle, and several others. The best chart type depends largely on the nature of the data, and will be discussed later.

2.   Set up the axes (AxisX and chart.View.AxisY properties)
Setting up the axes typically involves specifying the axis title, major and minor intervals for the tick marks, content and format for the labels to show next to the tick marks.

3.   Add one or more data series (chart.Data.Children collection)
This step involves creating and populating one DataSeries object for each series on the chart, then adding the object to the chart.Data.Children collection. If your data contains only one numeric value per point (Y coordinate), use regular DataSeries objects. If the data contains two numeric values per point (X and Y coordinates), then use XYDataSeries objects instead.

4.   Adjust the chart’s appearance using the Theme and Palette properties.
The Theme property allows you to select one of over 10 built-in sets of properties that control the appearance of the overall chart. The Palette property allows you to select one of over 20 built-in color palettes used to specify colors for the data series. Together, these two properties provide about 200 options to create professionally-looking charts with little effort.