About Appearance Files

Appearance files are one of the most important elements in PopChart images. They contain all of the information about what the graphs should look like—essentially providing PopChart Server with a template for the images it generates.

You can create appearance files in PopChart Builder, an easy to use designer for graph generation. You can create an appearance file from scratch, or you can customize one from a template using the PopChart Wizard.

There are also several example appearance files in the examples/apfiles folder of your document root.

Appearance files are saved in a format called PopChart XML (see Chapter 10). This is a text-based format that you can easily manipulate in a text editor. PopChart XML is also flexible enough to allow you to modify or create your appearance file on the fly.

By default, PopChart Server expects to find its appearance files in its document root (chart_root). For organizational purposes, PopChart Builder saves these files in the apfiles subfolder of that directory. Appearance files have a .pcxml extension.

appearance files contain sample data to help you get a feel for what the graph will look like when it has real data in it. To make things simple for now, we will just use that sample data. In most cases, though, you will send live data to PopChart Server, which will be applied dynamically to the graphs in your appearance file. Although the data will change, PopChart Server will retain the layout and formatting options that you specified in your appearance file.

Because appearance files are merely templates for graphs, it is hard to know exactly how the resulting will graph will look when fed real data. For tips on creating an appearance file that will look good no matter what data is fed to it, you should refer to "Tips for Creating Good Appearance Files" in Chapter 1.