Chartsmith's AppleScript interface provides a means of remotely controlling the construction of charts and graphs. This is used by our customers who automate their workflows and by our customers who build custom applications that integrate charting functions. Read on to learn more, or check out the AppleScript samples page.

Automated Workflows

The AppleScript interface allows a script to create new documents and new charts, add rows and columns of data to the charts, set label and title text, set graphical attributes for the chart, export or print chart images, and save Chartsmith documents.

This ability to remotely construct charts allows you to collect data, build a chart using the data, and publish the chart image - all with your hands free.

Let's say, for example, that you wanted to publish a line chart to your website everyday that displayed the maximum temperatures for each of the previous 5 days. You could build a script that retrieved the data, then created a chart, inserted the data, applied a template to format the chart, then exported a JPEG of the chart to your website directories. You could then setup to have the script run each day, and your work is done.


The script would control the process, but Chartsmith would do all the heavy lifting.



Custom Applications

If you are a software developer, you will be thrilled to know that your applications can leverage Chartsmith to construct the charts that you want to display in your custom applications. By simply issuing AppleScript events, you can control the construction of charts programmatically.

When your application has completed the construction of a chart, it can simply export the chart as an image, then import that image into the custom application.


For example, let's say that you want to write a custom application that will allow users to type in a stock ticker symbol (say "aapl" or "dell") and display that stock's performance in a chart. The custom application would retrieve the data, insert the price data into a price chart, insert the volume data into a volume chart, then format each of the charts using templates. Then the chart images would be exported from Chartsmith, and imported and displayed within the custom application.

Sound powerful? It is. Sound complicated? It's not. In fact, we offer a sample custom application that does exactly this. See StockCharter on the AppleScript Samples page.