Overview:

As part of evangelism job I speak to a lot of customer and try to tell them how they can use our controls. Couple of days back I was speaking one customer who was evaluating our RadControls for Silverlight suite and in particular was working with RadCartesianChart control. He saw all our demos of RadCartesianChart we ship and said that they all provide data from the code behind and are static in nature. They were looking for examples which tell them how to consume data from a WCF service and provide it to RadCartesianChart. So this blog post is all about how do we provide data to ChartView from a WCF Service. So lets get started.

Create RadControls Silverlight Application:

First thing to do, is to create a new project of type RadControls Silverlight Application. I am using Visual Studio 2012 for the rest of this blog post. You can do this in VS2010 too. Open Visual Studio IDE and select File > New Project. In the New Project dialog select Telerik > Silverlight > C# RadControls Silverlight Application. Give a name for the project and click ok.

Fig 1. New Project Dialog

Next, Visual Studio will ask you whether to host the SL app in a new web site and what should be the SL version. I am opting SL Version 5 for the sake of the demo. Here is the screenshot of the dialog:

Fig 2. Silverlight Application Settings Dialog

Since we have selected RadControls Silverlight Application, next you will get a “Project Configuration Wizard” where you will select the Components you require in your project. Since I am only interested in Charting, I will select only Telerik.Windows.Controls.Charting and the wizard automatically selects the dependent components for me. Here is the screenshot of the dialog:

Fig 3: Telerik Project Configuration Wizard – Silverlight Settings Dialog

Clicking next will take you to theme settings. I am selecting Windows8 theme that comes out of the box. Click finish to let Visual Studio create the project.

Fig 4: Telerik Project Configuration Wizard – Theme Settings Dialog

Once Visual Studio finishes creating the project, here is how the solution will look like:

Fig 5: Solution Explorer

You can see that we have 2 projects in the solution. One is the actual Silverlight app and another is the Web app which will host the Silverlight XAP. Next we look at how to create a WCF service.

Create WCF Service:

For the sake of the demo, I will be creating a WCF service which does the following things:

• Create a ProductModel which will act as a DataContract. It will have ProductID, Name and Price as properties
• Create a WCF Service which will connect to Northwind Database.
• Have one Operation called GetTop10ProductsByPrice.  This will execute a simple query to fetch top 10 products price wise and convert that into list of ProductModel and return it to client

Product Model Class:

We will create the WCF service in Web App project. We App will host our service too. Create a new folder called “Model” and create the ProductModel class. Here is the code for the ProductModel class:

[DataContract]
public class ProductModel
{
private int productID;
[DataMember]
public int ProductID
{
get { return productID; }
set { productID = value; }
}

private string productName;
[DataMember]
public string ProductName
{
get { return productName; }
set { productName = value; }
}

private decimal price;
[DataMember]
public decimal Price
{
get { return price; }
set { price = value; }
}
}

Chart Data WCF Service:

First create a folder and name it as Services. Right click on Services folder and select Add > New Item. In Add New Item dialog, select Silverlight from installed templates and then Silverlight-enabled WCF Service. Lets name the service as ChartDataService.svc. Click Add to create the service.

Fig 6: Add New Item dialog

Next, since we need to connect to Northwind database, add a connection string to Web.config in the Web project. I have named my connection string as “NorthwindConnection”.

Next, in the ChartDataService, remove the generated operation contact with name “DoWork”. Instead add a new Operation and lets call it “GetTop10ProductsByPrice”. In this function we will connect to Northwind Database using SQL Connection and execute a simple query. We will loop through the data reader and generate a list of ProductModel and return the list. Here is the code for GetTop10ProductsByPrice operation:

[OperationContract]
        public IList GetTop10Products()
        {
            string nwConn = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["NorthwindConnection"].ConnectionString;
            var prodList = new List();
            using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(nwConn))
            {
                const string sql = @"SELECT TOP 10 ProductID, ProductName, UnitPrice
                                     FROM Products
                                     ORDER BY UnitPrice DESC";
                conn.Open();
                using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(sql, conn))
                {
                    SqlDataReader dr = cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection);
                    if (dr != null)
                        while (dr.Read())
                        {
                            var cust = new ProductModel
                            {
                                ProductID = dr.GetInt32(0),
                                ProductName = dr.GetString(1),
                                Price = dr.GetDecimal(2)
                            };
                            prodList.Add(cust);
                        }
                    return prodList;
                }
            }
        }

Consuming WCF Service from Silverlight App:

Now that we have a service, next thing to do is to reference that service in our Silverlight application. Right click on Silverlight application and select “Add Service Reference”. In the Add Service Reference window, click on Discover button. The WCF Service we created in the previous section will be automatically discovered and will list down the operation it supports.

Fig 7: Add Service Reference Dialog

Now click on the Advanced button located in the bottom left side of the dialog to open the service reference settings dialog. In the Service Reference Settings dialog, under Reuse types in referenced assemblies, select the System related assemblies and not the Telerik ones. Here is a screenshot of the dialog:

Fig 8: Service Reference Settings Dialog

Clicking Ok will add a service reference in Silverlight app which can be invoked at runtime to fetch the data required for the chart.

Add RadCartesianChart Control:

Next we need to add the ChartView control on the screen. In order to do this, Open MainPage.xaml, identify the ChartView control from the toolbox, drag and drop it on to the MainPage.XAML. Give the chart a name. Here is the code to CartesianChart markup:

<telerik:RadCartesianChart Grid.Row="1" 
                            x:Name="chartView" 
                            Palette="Metro">
    <telerik:RadCartesianChart.VerticalAxis>
        <telerik:LinearAxis Title="Price (USD)"/>
    </telerik:RadCartesianChart.VerticalAxis>
    <telerik:RadCartesianChart.HorizontalAxis>
        <telerik:CategoricalAxis Title="Products"/>
    </telerik:RadCartesianChart.HorizontalAxis>
    <telerik:RadCartesianChart.Series>
        <telerik:BarSeries x:Name="barSeries1" 
                            ItemsSource="{Binding}" 
                            ValueBinding="Price" 
                            CategoryBinding="ProductName" 
                            ShowLabels="True" />
    </telerik:RadCartesianChart.Series>
</telerik:RadCartesianChart>

Lets take a closer look at the code. I first define the vertical axis and tell the chart that it’s a linear axis. I also set title to the vertical axis and call it “Price (USD)” because my vertical axis will hold the price of products. Next, I define horizontal axis and and tell the chart that it’s a Categorical axis. My horizontal axis will be used to represent the product itself, so setting the title of horizontal axis as “Products”. Now that we have finished setting the axis only thing left now is to create a series. So I define Series and create a BarSeries. I have given a name for the bar series and will use this name in code behind to perform data binding. We need to provide the data to the series – so lets set the ItemsSource to the Binding it will get at runtime. Now we need to tell what fields corresponds to the value of the series and what corresponds to the category axis of the series. Set ValueBinding to “Price” field and CategoryBining to “ProductName”.

Data Binding:

We defined the UI part of the chart. Now to provide data to the chart. We had add a service reference to our WCF service earlier. So we will have a client class created in the Silverlight project and will be known as ChartServiceClient. So we will use this client class to invoke the “GetTop10Products” operation. Here is the code to invoke the service and bind the data received to the chart view:

void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
            ChartServiceClient client = new ChartServiceClient();
            client.GetTop10ProductsCompleted += client_GetTop10ProductsCompleted;
            client.GetTop10ProductsAsync();
}

void client_GetTop10ProductsCompleted(object sender, GetTop10ProductsCompletedEventArgs e)
{
            var data = e.Result;
            this.chartView.DataContext = data;
}

As you can see we invoke the operation asynchronously. When the operation completes we get the data and set it as the DataContext of the Chart. Run the application and when the page loads we should get the Chart as below:

As you can see we get our bar series graph which will show the price (in USD) on the vertical axis and products in the horizontal axis. We see the top 10 products by price.

Conclusion:

In this blog post, what I attempted was a very specific scenario which is most common on real world. As I said in the beginning, the customer I was talking to wanted to see an example of how to connect to a WCF Service, get data from the service and bind that data to Chart. So this blog posts outlines the steps required to make the chart work with WCF Service, Hope this is useful to many of you who may be having the same scenario. Do let me know your feedback if any.

Till next time – Happy Coding!