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April 26, 2005

MXNA 2.0 Reports

In case you haven't noticed, the beta version of MXNA 2.0 is being rolled out incrementally. Today's increment: MXNA 2.0 reports.

Mike Chambers and I have been working on and off on the new MXNA 2.0 reports, along with a general reporting framework, for a couple of weeks now, and I think they turned out really well. We used Flex and the Flex charting components for the graphs themselves, and AJAX (JavaScript) to load and render post data without refreshing the page. The charts are populated with data through the MXNA 2.0 web services, and can express that data in a variety of ways as the user interacts with them. And when the user clicks on certain parts of the chart, the relevant posts are rendered below using AJAX, almost instantaneously. The whole experience allows for a great deal of interactivity without a single page refresh, and with almost no waiting.

We feel that combining Flash and AJAX in this instance allows us to get the best of both worlds, and really gives the user a unique and immediate user experience. Flash/Flex were perfect for the charts, and really allowed us to focus on the data and the presentation rather than the mechanics of the charts themselves. Using AJAX to render the post data allowed us to reuse the exact same rendering code that the rest of the application uses when displaying posts, and because it is HTML, it allows for things like shift-clicking on links, and native browser scroll bars.

We have several more reports in the pipeline, but we probably won't be launching any more this week since I'm in Las Vegas as TODCON. If you have any ideas for specific reports that you would like to see, let us know. We want to make sure we are presenting the community with the most useful information we can.

Posted by cantrell at April 26, 2005 02:30 PM | References

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Comments

really impressive

Posted by: luar at April 26, 2005 02:37 PM

These are awesome, if only I could afford flex...

Posted by: Ryan Guill at April 26, 2005 03:09 PM