Monthly Archives: December 2009

Alright, time to add some actual functionality to this thing. First I want a report showing up on the scorecard page that has already been created. I don’t really care what it displays, just want to get it working and displaying. I will get one report working and then pull up others and connect them with actual data from the Model.

First things first I grabbed the MS Charting controls, which you will need to follow along with this section of code. I assume for the rest of this entry that the charting controls are installed.

First off I created some nice fake data in a DataTable. The object I created is below. This is located in the Models path for now. Just to get this mocked up.

public class ReportSampleData

    public ReportSampleData()

        SampleData = new DataTable("Adron's Sample Data");

        SampleData.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col1"));

        SampleData.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col2"));

        SampleData.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col3"));

        SampleData.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col4"));

        DataRow dr1 = SampleData.NewRow();

        dr1[0] = "Sample Set 1";

        dr1[1] = 14;

        dr1[2] = 13;

        dr1[3] = 10;

        DataRow dr2 = SampleData.NewRow();

        dr2[0] = "Sample Set 2";

        dr2[1] = 15;

        dr2[2] = 13;

        dr2[3] = 12;

        DataRow dr3 = SampleData.NewRow();

        dr3[0] = "Sample Set 2";

        dr3[1] = 17;

        dr3[2] = 11;

        dr3[3] = 9;

        SampleData.Rows.Add(dr1);

        SampleData.Rows.Add(dr2);

        SampleData.Rows.Add(dr3);

    public DataTable SampleData { get; set; }

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
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.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
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.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
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.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

Once I created the fake data, I dropped in the chart control into the Display.aspx view under the Scorecard Directory of the views.

<%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %>

<%@ Register Assembly="System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"

    Namespace="System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting" TagPrefix="asp" %>

<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server">

    Scorecard

</asp:Content>

<asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">

    <form id="form1" runat="server">

    <h2>

        Scorecard

    </h2>

<%

        using (Chart chartColumns = new Chart())

            chartColumns.Width = 412;

            chartColumns.Height = 296;

            chartColumns.RenderType = RenderType.ImageTag;

            chartColumns.Palette = ChartColorPalette.None;

            Title t = new Title("Column Bar Chart",

                Docking.Top,

                new System.Drawing.Font("Verdana, Helvetica, Sans-Serif", 14, System.Drawing.FontStyle.Bold),

                System.Drawing.Color.FromArgb(26, 59, 105));

            chartColumns.Titles.Add(t);

            chartColumns.ChartAreas.Add("Series 1");

            // create a couple of series

            chartColumns.Series.Add("Series 1");

            chartColumns.Series.Add("Series 2");

            // add points to series 1

            foreach (int value in (List<int>)ViewData["Chart"])

                chartColumns.Series["Series 1"].Points.AddY(value + DateTime.Now.Second);

            // add points to series 2

            foreach (int value in (List<int>)ViewData["Chart"])

                chartColumns.Series["Series 2"].Points.AddY(value + DateTime.Now.Minute);

            chartColumns.Legends.Add("Legend1");

            chartColumns.BorderSkin.SkinStyle = BorderSkinStyle.None;

            // Render chart control

            chartColumns.Page = this;

            HtmlTextWriter writer = new HtmlTextWriter(Page.Response.Output);

            chartColumns.RenderControl(writer);

%>

    </form>

</asp:Content>

Once that was finished the final step is to toss in the controller the view data.

public ActionResult Display()

    ViewData["Chart"] = new List<int>() {4, 6, 12, 3, 11};

    return View("Display");

Now run the app and check out the page. You should see a chart like that shown below. (Click for larger image)

That covers the second part of this series. I will have another addition up soon, tying even more bits together.

ASP.NET MVC Scorecard Web Application – Part 1

December 29, 2009

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There have been a lot of requests for MVC based scorecards, so I am going to kick off a new series of wiring up an MVC scorecard site. This first part will simply cover setting up the basic site and skeleton framework using the default ASP.NET MVC Project.

Start off by starting a new ASP.NET MVC Project. Since I will be creating tests for this walk through, be sure to add a unit test project also. I am just using the default MS-test libraries for now, but feel free to apply whatever test framework you would like.

To create additional views and controllers we’ll add a unit test for a new controller. I will name this new controller ScorecardController, so I have added a test file called ScorecardControllerTest.cs. The first test is just the standard action for the appropriate method actions and returning the view, as follows. I added a similar test for the Index method also.

[TestClass]

public class ScorecardControllerTest

    [TestMethod]

    public void Scorecard()

        ScorecardController scorecardController = new ScorecardController();

        var result = scorecardController.Scorecard() as ViewResult;

        Assert.IsNotNull(result);

    [TestMethod]

    public void Index()

        ScorecardController scorecardController = new ScorecardController();

        var result = scorecardController.Index() as ViewResult;

        Assert.IsNotNull(result);

public class ScorecardController : Controller

    public ActionResult Index()

        return View();

    public ActionResult Scorecard()

        return View();

At this point I need to create some tests for what is expected in the view, but I will get to that once a bit more of the skeleton of the site is done. As soon as I wrote these tests, based on where they are located in my folder structure I decided that I need to do a quick refactor of the name. Having a Scorecard/Scorecard path just seemed stupid, so I renamed the Scorecard.aspx to Display.aspx and changed the method name appropriately. If you are following along, the subsequent code will be using the renamed page/method, etc.

The next thing I wanted to do was to get the view coming up appropriately, so first things first, new tests.

[TestMethod]

public void ScorecardViewExists()

    ScorecardController scorecardController = new ScorecardController();

    var result = scorecardController.Display() as ViewResult;

    Assert.AreEqual("Display", result.ViewName);

First of course it fails, but with the appropriate change shown, all runs green again.

public ActionResult Display()

    return View("Display");

So after this I added the following tests, controller actions, and views.

[TestMethod]

public void Select()

    ScorecardController scorecardController = new ScorecardController();

    var result = scorecardController.Select() as ViewResult;

    Assert.IsNotNull(result);

[TestMethod]

public void SelectViewNamed()

    ScorecardController scorecardController = new ScorecardController();

    var result = scorecardController.Select() as ViewResult;

    Assert.AreEqual("Select", result.ViewName);

[TestMethod]

public void IndexViewNamed()

    ScorecardController scorecardController = new ScorecardController();

    var result = scorecardController.Index() as ViewResult;

    Assert.AreEqual("Index", result.ViewName);

After that I edited the CSS so I could get a better feel to the site relative to what I am working toward. I will leave you to decide what you want to do with the CSS & such yourself. One of these days I will be graphic artists worthy, for now I am just happy with a decent looking layout and reasonable colors.

When I was done my Solution Explorer looked like this.

Last I added the following to the Site.Master page for appropriate linkages. This spot is located in the menucontainer section of the page.

<div id="menucontainer">

    <ul id="menu">

        <li>

            <%= Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")%></li>

        <li>

            <%= Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")%></li>

        <li>

            <%= Html.ActionLink("Scorecard", "Display", "Scorecard") %></li>

    </ul>

</div>

When I run the app I now have a basic skeleton and the initial pages I am going to work with. Next steps coming soon.

Webtrends, Teradata, Trending, and The Next Big Bangs

December 28, 2009

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A recent article The Next Big Bang by our Webtrends CEO, Alex Yoder, was published recently online via Teradata. It got me thinking toward the technical aspects of what is within our reach in the analytics industry. The industry as a whole has moved past the mere counting of visits & their respective users as numbers and moved to making the numbers actually represent the people. That can be a weird statement, but I will clarify a bit more.

Years ago, one would setup a server and start tracking hits on a website. Often these would be called views or page views. What did that mean though? Effectively it meant zero, zilch, nothing of any value. You know only that a machine, or machines, made X number of views against a website. One didn't know what kind of browser, device, PC, Apple, screen size, or if the views were even unique to a machine or possibly unique to a user.

Then everything changed, and this is still the past I am speaking about. We finally started enabling detection of devices, browsers, screens, viewable, and types of visits. This elaboration of data drastically altered what we could build for a website. It made good design more measurable by audience participation.

A short time afterwards the industry was able to move forward and get into doing some further pre-analysis of this data. This enabled more actionable and intelligent decisions being made from web analytics data. The analytics data started creeping into the realms of business intelligence, general reporting, and actual information.

The next huge leap, which is close to where we are now, is the opening up of these sources of analytics data and bridging the final gaps in the Web, Enterprise, and E-commerce Architectures. The complete full cycle evolution has occurred from IT, to Engineering, to Marketing and over to Sales. A company can now integrate their data from analytics with their data from point of sale systems and derive true, daily, value from the decisions that can be made from these sources.

The Future Arrives

Now we are at a point, with the level of services and opening of data, that almost any valuable data point can be tracked and trended with high accuracy. Gone are the needs for traditional media that leaves one with massive gaps in segmentation and individual directed content. Today we have vastly greater capabilities.

We can analyze and provide data that helps companies at so many levels, such as tracking game play to pinpoint the fun parts versus the boring parts of a game. We can derive the dead spaces in a web site, or better yet the hard to navigate areas of an actual brick and mortar storefront. Even more analytics can provide and correlate tracking against the usage of a car or transit system, an airline boarding flow, and draw causable correlation between the very first steps a consumer takes the the purchase and beyond. All because the data is open and cross-correlative.

This leads me to my next question. What architectures have you found valuable? What combination of data cross-correlated with analytics data have given you actionable measures? What other devices, sites, and mechanisms provide a value to track, trend, and analyze? I would love to hear what users have found useful in their own environments, so please leave a comment or three. : )