Display Graph in ASP.NET MVC

public ActionResult Index()
{
return View();
}
}

From the above steps now you know how to create MVC applications and add the controller to the application. Next we have to add a view related to the methods present in the controller. So add one view for the index method to show on startup which will contain one ActionLink to display the graph. To add a view right-click in Method and select Add View as shown below.



From the above screen you see how to add a view to an ASP.NET MVC application. Now whenever we call any method then the respective view will be rendered in the client browser. You can keep the actionlink in the Index.aspx using the following line of code.

<%=Html.ActionLink("View Graph", "Graph")%>

In the above line you can see we have created a Html.ActionLink which takes View Graph and Graph as arguments; here View Graph is the text given to display and Graph is the action name in the controller. Next we will see how to prepare the graph; for this task we must add one more method in GraphController with the name Graph so copy and paste this method in GraphController.

public ActionResult Graph()
{
string[] _xval = { "vulpes", "Sp Nayak", "Krishna","Datta Kharad","Prabhu Raja" };
string[] _yval = { "235", "130", "30","25","15" };
//here the chart is going on
var bytes = new Chart(width: 600, height: 300)
.AddSeries(
chartType: "Column",legend:"Mindcracker Current Month Runner up",
xValue: _xval,
yValues: _yval)
.GetBytes("png");
return File(bytes, "image/png");

}

Before adding this method to the controller we need to add one using statement to System.Web.Helpers which contains the Chart. In the above method you can see we have created a string[] which is nothing but the data for our graph and we have created a chart which will take some arguments like charttype, legend and the values to display on the graph and this method will return File of bytes.

Configure Routing

When we create any MVC application our default routing is configured like bellow.

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

}

Here it will consider the default controller as Home but since this is an empty application we don't have a Home controller in our application so we need to change this default Home controller with our Graph controller so just change Home to Graph like below.

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

}

Output

The output will look like the followong screen.



Conclusion

In this way we can start working on ASP.Net MVC and easily prepare the Graph for a MVC application.