======= RFLOT v0.1a =======
by Paul Panarese

A rubygem of the jQuery graphing library.

RFlot is a helper class that will return HTML required to use flot.
It results in easy-to-use coding in a Ruby-on-Rails application.

Installation:
----------------

Install via:

gem install rflot

OR include in your Gemfile (for rails 3.x)

gem 'rflot'

To install the flot javascript library, run

rake rflot:install_js

Usage:
---------

@plot = RFlot.new(graph_type,data[,graph_options])
@html = @plot.graph

which, in your view, make sure you declare your html to be html_safe:
<%= @html.html_safe %>

Also included is your JS include tags

<%= @plot.js_tags([tags]) %>

There are a few main methods:

#graph(graph_type,data[,graph_options])

graph_type is "line","bar","pie","area", etc. If you want to combine, you can call a secondary graph_type in graph_options

data can be an array, a hash, but the preferred data type is JSON. If using rails, you can take your data hash and apply .to_json

The method will return the HTML and javascript required for your graph.

#js_tags([tags]) OR #javascript_include_tags

Will return the HTML for including the flot libraries. Its syntax is "selection" for jquery.selection.pie.js or "image" for jquery.flot.image.js.
You can also specify the entire name "jquery.flot.pie.js".
jquery.flot.js is included by default. If you define a pie graph, jquery.flot.pie.js is automatically included. Please use .html_safe on this method.

======= FLOT ======
About
-----

Flot is a Javascript plotting library for jQuery. Read more at the
website:

  http://code.google.com/p/flot/

Take a look at the examples linked from above, they should give a good
impression of what Flot can do and the source code of the examples is
probably the fastest way to learn how to use Flot.
  

Installation
------------

Just include the Javascript file after you've included jQuery.

Note that you need to get a version of Excanvas (e.g. the one bundled
with Flot) which is canvas emulation on Internet Explorer. You can
include the excanvas script like this:

  <!--[if IE]><script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="excanvas.pack.js"></script><![endif]-->

If it's not working on your development IE 6.0, check that it has
support for VML which excanvas is relying on. It appears that some
stripped down versions used for test environments on virtual machines
lack the VML support.
  
Also note that you need at least jQuery 1.2.6 (but at least jQuery
1.3.2 is recommended for interactive charts because of performance
improvements in event handling).


Basic usage
-----------

Create a placeholder div to put the graph in:

   <div id="placeholder"></div>

You need to set the width and height of this div, otherwise the plot
library doesn't know how to scale the graph. You can do it inline like
this:

   <div id="placeholder" style="width:600px;height:300px"></div>

You can also do it with an external stylesheet. Make sure that the
placeholder isn't within something with a display:none CSS property -
in that case, Flot has trouble measuring label dimensions which
results in garbled looks and might have trouble measuring the
placeholder dimensions which is fatal (it'll throw an exception).

Then when the div is ready in the DOM, which is usually on document
ready, run the plot function:

  $.plot($("#placeholder"), data, options);

Here, data is an array of data series and options is an object with
settings if you want to customize the plot. Take a look at the
examples for some ideas of what to put in or look at the reference
in the file "API.txt". Here's a quick example that'll draw a line from
(0, 0) to (1, 1):

  $.plot($("#placeholder"), [ [[0, 0], [1, 1]] ], { yaxis: { max: 1 } });

The plot function immediately draws the chart and then returns a plot
object with a couple of methods.


What's with the name?
---------------------

First: it's pronounced with a short o, like "plot". Not like "flawed".

So "Flot" rhymes with "plot".

And if you look up "flot" in a Danish-to-English dictionary, some up
the words that come up are "good-looking", "attractive", "stylish",
"smart", "impressive", "extravagant". One of the main goals with Flot
is pretty looks.