What is best way to draw chart with large amounts of data?

Question

What is best way to draw chart on silverlight application ?

I see 2 ways:

• draw chart on server side and display on client
• fetch chart data from server and render chart on client

Both ways are "good for me".. But I see some inconvenience:

• in first case if I need to change e.g. chart period I need call server for new chart picture
• in second case I need load mass of data from server and store on client.. so in this case I get mobility on client..

What is best way to draw charts with large amounts of data? Is there any other way?

Answer 1

It really depends on your use-case and what the user should do with the data. Client-side rendering gives you more flexibility with display options, ofcourse.

But you don't need to move massive amounts of data. I bet the user has much less pixels in his chart than there are data points, so you can run some aggregation functions server side before transferring data to the locally rendered chart.