Steema Central

Dear Steema Support,

A colleague of mine is considering TChart for an upcoming project. For evaluation purposes he is using the version of TChart that ships with D2007. He has encountered a few issues, described below. I told him that the support forums were very responsive and he should ask his question there, he replied that the forums were for registered users only. So to help him out (and maybe help you get some additional sales) I offered to post the questions for him. I think he is mostly interested in the stability of Version 8 relative to the version shipping with D2007. Do you have any metrics considering the stability of Version vs. Version 7? Are there plans to bundle version 8 with future version of Delphi?

Also, he and several others have commmented on the complexity of TChart in the Codegear thirdparty newsgroup. This was surprising to me as I though TChart was well organized and straight forward to use, but I have been using it since the beginning. I think that since your feature set is now so rich, you need sooome additional introductory help material. I would suggest perhaps some white papers published on cdn, some additionall tutorials, and perhaps some camtaisa style videos a la Nick's 30 Delphi videos in 30 days.

Also, is there any support available for users of the D2007 bundled version of TChart?

His information and questions follow. I hope you can assist him.

Thanks

Dan Sox

Dan Barclay wrote:

It is Delphi 2007 for Win32 Enterprise. The TeeChart is TeeChart 7 which comes with Delphi. The About Box says "TeeChart Standard v7.10 Win32".

I'm trying to do some graphing and having mixed luck with TChart. It's likely I have something set wrong given all the selections. (Delphi 2007 with TChart off the TeeChart Std palette0. A couple of observations/questions:

1. If I'm doing a bar graph, side by side, two series, I get the chart set up fine. Then I try to Change the chart to 3D by selecting the checkbox on the chart selection panel. The 3D checkbox is checked for both series, yet only the first series is 3D (the second bar is still flat). What am I missing?

2. Pressing Help only displays a dialog that it can't find the help file (Namespace not specified: ms-help://\TeeChart7.hlp")

3. Having created a bar chart (above side by side two series) the "value" of each bar of the second series is displayed above the bar. I have not been successful in turning this off, or in turning on a display of the value of the first bar. I'd be OK either way, but showing the value of only the second bar isn't OK.

Suggestions? What am I missing?

Thanks,
Dan

Hi Dan,

Thank you very much for your interest and collaboration.

Do you have any metrics considering the stability of Version vs. Version 7?

We don't have any metrics but we try to fix all stability issues that may appear and we are also trying to enhance performance with every release.

Are there plans to bundle version 8 with future version of Delphi?

Work is inhand in preparation of a TeeChart standard version 8 for future versions of Delphi. We don't yet have specific details available of with which versions of Delphi it may be packaged. We'll add more information to this thread when available.

Also, he and several others have commmented on the complexity of TChart in the Codegear thirdparty newsgroup. This was surprising to me as I though TChart was well organized and straight forward to use, but I have been using it since the beginning. I think that since your feature set is now so rich, you need sooome additional introductory help material. I would suggest perhaps some white papers published on cdn, some additionall tutorials, and perhaps some camtaisa style videos a la Nick's 30 Delphi videos in 30 days.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've added it to the wish-list to be considered for inclusion in future releases.

Also, is there any support available for users of the D2007 bundled version of TChart?

Yes, they can use our public newsgroups, we try to reply issues there ASAP though forums being prioritary. Public newsgroups are available at news://www.steema.net

1. If I'm doing a bar graph, side by side, two series, I get the chart set up fine. Then I try to Change the chart to 3D by selecting the checkbox on the chart selection panel. The 3D checkbox is checked for both series, yet only the first series is 3D (the second bar is still flat). What am I missing?

I'm not able to reproduce the issue here using v7. Could you please send us a simple example project we can run "as-is" or the exact steps we should follow to reproduce the issue here?

You can either post your files at news://www.steema.net/steema.public.attachments newsgroup or at our upload page.

2. Pressing Help only displays a dialog that it can't find the help file (Namespace not specified: ms-help://\TeeChart7.hlp")

This is because TeeChart help can't be integrated in RAD Studio 2007. This is because in BDS the traditional .hlp help file system was changed to HTML help and Borland/CodeGear never published how to integrate .hlp files into BDS, only a non-working unit (WinHelpViewer) was created for that. Using this unit crashed BDS 2006 help system and we had to remove the mentioned unit.

Moreover, CodeGear doesn't ship TeeChart's .hlp help file with Delphi 2007. In the meantime, you can download a help file here.

We plan to have HTML help available in the future.

3. Having created a bar chart (above side by side two series) the "value" of each bar of the second series is displayed above the bar. I have not been successful in turning this off, or in turning on a display of the value of the first bar. I'd be OK either way, but showing the value of only the second bar isn't OK.

You may make all series marks visible or not visible like this: