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Specifying Items

In This Article

The chart control can be bound to any custom data source and supports several data types.

Supported Quantifiable Axis Types

The chart control supports a fixed set of quantifiable data types along each axis.

The supported data types include:

  • Byte

  • DateTime

  • Decimal

  • Double

  • Int16

  • Int32

  • Int64

  • Float

  • SByte

  • UInt16

  • UInt32

  • UInt64

When the X or Y axis values are of these data types, then the values can be mapped on an axis according to their relative position within the axis Minimum and Maximum values.

Other Axis Types

For all other types of data, including complex objects and String, they will be mapped using XYGroupedAxis.

When using XYGroupedAxis, items will be grouped based on object equality by default. Items can be grouped using custom logic by specifying XYGroupedAxis.GroupingFunc.

Setting ItemsSource

Each series in a chart control can be bound to a separate data source, or to different properties on the same data source. The ItemsSource property on each series can be set to any collection of objects, including custom objects, as long as the collection implements IEnumerable.

In this case, the XPath and/or YPath properties must be set to the name of a property on the objects in the collection.

Tip

You can traverse complex hierarchies to get to the value you need by using a property path that is delimited by a period (.). For example, you can set XPath or YPath to something like "MyProperty.MyOtherProperty.MyDoubleValue", similar to how binding paths work in XAML.

For example, consider the following custom object:

public class SalesData {

	private decimal amount;
	private DateTime date;

	/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
	// OBJECT
	/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

	/// <summary>
	/// Initializes a new instance of the <c>SalesData</c> class.
	/// </summary>
	/// <param name="date">The date for which the amount is specified.</param>
	/// <param name="amount">The sales amount.</param>
	public SalesData(DateTime date, decimal amount) {
		this.date = date;
		this.amount = amount;
	}

	/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
	// PUBLIC PROCEDURES
	/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

	/// <summary>
	/// Gets the sales amount.
	/// </summary>
	/// <value>The sales amount.</value>
	public decimal Amount {
		get {
			return amount;
		}
	}

	/// <summary>
	/// Gets the date for which the amount is specified.
	/// </summary>
	/// <value>The date for which the amount is specified.</value>
	public DateTime Date {
		get {
			return date;
		}
	}

}

We can specify that the Y values should be pulled from the Amount property by setting YPath to "Amount". If we want to use the index in the collection as our X values, then we do not need to set XPath.

If instead we want the X values to be pulled from the Date property, then we would need to set XPath to "Date".