The past month or so has seen quite a few improvements and bug fixes to FlexChart, though I haven't blogged about any of them. Most notably, there was a weird NPE that manifested itself when loading a Pie chart via FlashVars. For some unknown reason, Flex/Flash didn't give any indication the error was occurring, it just silently terminated the active call stack and continued on it's merry way. This left the app in a quasi-broken state that would prevent certain future calls from working, but allowing others to execute without issue. I still have no explanation as to why the error silently terminated, but I've since seen the same behaviour inside FDS, so it's not charting specific.
The ability to style charts has been extended a bit, though it's still not as highly polished as I could wish. For example, supplying a stroke weight for a line series causes the stroke color to default to black, instead of the automatically assigned color (orange, green, blue, …). In the reverse case, if you supply custom colors on a Pie chart, they render correctly, but the legend (if one is used) uses the default colors (orange, green, blue, …). Gradient fills are now available as well.
I've also improved handling of empty charts. The stock custom tag requires a descriptor, but if you don't have data at page render time, you usually end up providing "<chart />" as the descriptor. The engine now detects this case (whether on the initial load or later passed in), and is a bit more intelligent about ensuring it clears it's stage. Previously you could end up with an empty CartesianChart in some cases.
Finally, I made a number of improvements to performance and handling of data values. This was mostly accomplished by explicitly converting the XML nodes into real objects for the chart to render, rather than using the XML directly. There were some implicit type conversions that didn't happen consistently out of XML nodes, but work fine out of generic objects.
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