Graphics in the Net

[Mike Chaple]

I have an application in VB 6.0 that fecth records from Oracle DB and Plot a Graphic, Students (enrolled/droped etc) vs Time. This application use Picture Control methods and properties.

I was wondering what will be the best approach to make this available to Internet users.

I have experience developing ASP pages, however, never converted a VB application to the Internet.

Thank you in advance for your help and very Happy new year.

[mlewis]

You can either use Java (which means a rewrite) or build an ActiveX control and implement it in an HTML page. Its actually not too hard to do once the control works in a normal app. There are many tutorials out there on how to embed ActiveX controls in a web page.

[Mike Chaple]

Thanks, I was thinking in that direction, create an Internet enable control, perhaps. I don't think I will have much problems building the Activex. However embeding it in the HTML I have never done it.

I will appreciate if you can you point me to the tutorial.

Regards

[mlewis]

http://www.google.com/

[CornedBee]

I probably wouldn't download a whole ActiveX object (much less a VB-created one) for something that could be done in a way that doesn't require me to download anything. And ActiveX objects don't work in Mozilla anyway.

[Sastraxi]

Have it export a PNG/JPEG/GIF/TIFF/whatever with the filename being the ID of the current session. Next page, simply load the image that has the sessionid, and that will be the last image that was requested by your session (phew).

There are many ways to save these formats. The best way is with modFreeImage. Search it on google and you'll get the results you need.

[CornedBee]

This being a plotted graph I guess PNG is best.

[Mike Chaple]

Let see if I copy you correctly.

The VB application should plot the graphis as it is doing now in a picture control then:

- save it in PNG format

- Load it back up to the HTML page from the server

But any way I have to contact the server to run the VB application some how ?

Is that the plan ?

[Sastraxi]

You create a DLL project, and make an instance of the project in your ASP page to expose it's functionality (or if it's a public class module simply use it). Then, it can generate the file on the server, and another ASP page can link an IMG tag to it.