Google Charts API & Lotus Notes03/08/2008 11:49 PMSo I thought this was pretty neat as I was planning on implementing a Performance Scorecard type application in a Lotus Notes database. Basically I wanted to create a chart that a user could use to visually represent a KPI of billable hours vs hours available in a month. I was going to extend this to many more charts for different KPI's and was pretty excited at how easy to use the google charts api is.
However my plan has been thwarted!. Lotus Notes clients do not support png images! Yes I know amazing. You can import a PNG but this seems to convert it to a bmp. You can't refer to a png in an image tag to be viewed in a form or page for instance.
There seems to be a few SPR's logged with IBM on this topic:
SPR KSOA4CVSQG states that the Notes Browser does not support PNG files.
SPR MLAT5GSUAK states that a PNG does not display and has been closed as "not a bug".
SPR PBAO65AKFU is an enhancement request asking for future support of the PNG image format. Whenever opening a PMR to ask for PNG support refer to this SPR.
however it seems there is no immediate plan to support PNG.
So I thought I would post an idea on IdeaJam but found it is already there. So if you agree that this would be a good enhancement then please go vote for it.
The idea is here.
Technorati: Google Charts Lotus Notes
1. Axel Janssen10/03/2008 03:20:12 AM
Hi Adam,
png support in notes would be far better of course, but maybe in the meantime it is possible to take an extra step to convert the pngs into jpeg. It may be possible (http://tinyurl.com/2pxwee)
2. Adam Brown10/03/2008 07:51:25 PM
Homepage: http://www.isw.com.au/brownblog
Hi Axel,
Thanks for that. I had been looking at http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/index.html as an alternative to Google Charts but you might be onto something there. I do like the Google Charts API so if I can use Java 2D to convert the png then that might be the go.
Thanks
Adam
3. Peter Herrmann16/05/2008 01:27:07 PM
Adam - The magic undocumented incantation for Google Chart API to generate GIFs is "chof=gif". I have had it running in production in a notes based dashboard for a month with no problems (computed text marked as Pass-Thru HTML). I posted this too over on the IdeaJam item...
4. Adam Brown16/05/2008 01:55:17 PM
Homepage: http://www.isw.com.au/brownblog
Thanks Peter. We actually built a Domino database that has some java agents in it that takes the google request and magically converts the image to bmp, gif, or jpg. It works exactly the same way as the google api except the google maps url that we generate points to our domino server. The agent then takes the google api parameters an sends a request to google, gets the png, converts it to the requested format and wammo! We have done the same thing re the Pass-Thru HTML.
Sounds like you way may have been easier but it is really awesome being able to use the maps api.
Cheers
Adam.
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