One thing I'm learning during the SOC is that updates make a difference. I got back from a 2 week trip to San Diego, a holiday of sorts, much required escape from college !

I've been working with Hugo on getting Open Flash Charts (OFC) to fit in well with the OpenMRS environment. First off, here are few things that I have completed:

1. Run through the Actionscript code of the OFC to understand how it works. This was tough initially because almost all the code was in a single .fla file that could be read only by the Flash IDE. The most recent update for OFC came in after I had tried to do the same thing : Split the code into various classes for easy handling. Now the code is far more structured and much easier to work with.
2. The data format required by OFC was fixed, I worked on it's interaction with Javascript and now the chart can be rendered by calls made to it by Javascript, all the data is passed into it as one graph object. This simplifies the rendering and allows on the fly changes to be made without reloading the swf component. With simple AJAX calls, we can add, remove and alter data within the component. Also, since we will be working to integrate the swf with html elements in the page, this seems like a good option. A working page can be found here.

TODO:
The immediate todo list consists of 2 things:
1.What I am working on currently is the functionality of the chart to chart data in the form of tuples {(x1,y1),(x2,y2),...} instead of the current form of a data series {x1,x2,x3...}. Without this, it is difficult to plot a data series that is discontinous. This is very important because it will later allow us to scale the graph on the fly.
2. Use the DWR functions to get OpenMRS data using only javascript ! (I was ignorant about this until Ben pointed this out to me recently) I had worked on creating a servlet to generate the same data in XML and javascript on the client side to handle that XML. It helps to keep talking about your work, not only to your mentor but also to the rest of the folks with knowledge about the code base !

Once this is done (My personal deadline for both of this is the end of the week, but I want to get it done sooner.) I can get down the some actual visualization work.

Watch this space for more updates !