OWC chart bug

A

Alvin Bruney

There appears to be a bug in the owc chart 10 component.

The chart engine assumes that anything with a / or a - on the x-axis is a
date. How can a graphic engine make such an assumption since it cannot
conceivably know the context of the call? As if this weren't bad enough, if
values on the x-axis are formatted like so, 09/14 the owc graphing engine
appends 03 to the value making it 09/14/03. Who wrote this crap? 09-14
behaves the same way. How can the engine know what my values represent? More
importantly why is the graphing engine tampering with my data. That is a
fundamental flaw.

As if this weren't bad enough, the engine scans the range of values, and if
it determines that each range is exactly 7 values apart, it immediately
assumes that these values represent weeks. But here is the horror story. The
engine then rearranges the co-ordinates so that each week now starts on a
sunday. As an example, co-ordinate (9-15,20) is re-arranged to (9-14-03,20)
and so on and so forth. I spent a lot of hours tracking down this rubbish in
my code and playing with tick labels till i got tired unable to understand
where these magical values were coming from. I am not pleased.

An engine cannot assume that days of the week start on a sunday. PERIOD!
This is a business environment, not kindergarten. At my company, our
business week begins on a tuesday and ends on a monday. Payroll begins on a
friday and ends on a thursday. Invoices now are suddenly showing values
skewed to sunday because some idiot thinks that 7 days must start from
sunday. Business decisions are being made from this software. I am not
pleased. My work around is to replace the / or - with a ~. This flawed
assumption needs to be addressed.

And just to show how crappy that assumption is, if i put in a range with the
last value ending in 9-41, the engine doesn't know what to do with this and
either blows up or replaces ALL values on the x-axis with rubbish. I shudder
to think of the other assumptions built into the engine.
 
T

Thao Moua [ms]

The webchart engine tries to make the best guess based on
your data. On other OS besides US, the date separator is
a '-' and sometime something as shown in the regional
settings. So when the engine sees these characters we
assume date data. If this is not the case then you can
turn off auto-date format or better yet custom your date
format (ie mm/dd, m/d, m/dd, etc.)

What you're seeing is the default date formatting at
work. At times this is suitable for general cases, but
in your case you may need to customize your date format.

Thao Moua
OWC Webchart Support
 
A

Alvin Bruney

I understand that but my point is you all should not be making these
assumptions and guessing at the data.

MS has given me an address and instructions on how to submit this bug to
their development people so that they can look into it further.

Regards.
 
G

Graham Epps

Thanks - that fixes it.
Is there a tutorial on this Chart object anywhere?
This information was VERY well hidden.
G.
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Top