=Seer

Seer is a lightweight, semantically rich wrapper for the Google Visualization API. It allows you to easily create a visualization of data in a variety of formats, including area charts, bar charts, column charts, gauges, line charts, and pie charts.

==Usage

Add the following to the head of the page that will display a chart, or add it to your layout file:

  <%= Seer::init_visualization -%>

Gather the data you want to visualize in an instance variable in your controller, then use the visualize method to insert the appropriate chart in your view.

== Example

In your controller:

  # @data must be an array, and each object in the array must respond to the data method specified
  # in the visualize call (in this example, 'quantity')
  @data = Widget.all
  
In your view:

  <div id="chart"></div>

  <%= Seer::visualize(
        @widgets, 
        :as => :bar_chart,
        :in_element => 'chart',
        :series => {:series_label => 'name', :data_method => 'quantity'},
        :chart_options => {
          :height => 300,
          :width => 200 * @widgets.size,
          :is_3_d => false,
          :legend => 'none',
          :colors => ["#990000"],
          :title => "Widget Quantities",
          :title_x => 'Quantity',
          :title_y => 'Widgets'
        }
      )
   -%>

== More information

For examples of additional chart types, refer to the documentation for each of the individual chart objects, or see the blog post announcing Seer: {Simple, Semantic Graphing for Ruby on Rails with Seer}[http://www.idolhands.com/ruby-on-rails/gems-plugins-and-engines/graphing-for-ruby-on-rails-with-seer]

A {sample project}[http://github.com/Bantik/seer_sample] that demonstrates each of the chart types is available on GitHub.

Seer is developed and maintained by {Corey Ehmke}[http://www.idolhands.com/] at {SEO Logic}[http://www.seologic.com/].

Copyright (c) 2010 Corey Ehmke / SEO Logic, released under the MIT license