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I'm using CF2016 on a Windows computer. There are third-party info graphic plug-ins like extendstudio. But the information has to be hard coded into instead of being dynamic. Coldfusion has its own charting capabilities but I'm looking for an open source, responsive infographic plug-in or software that I can load my <cfoutput> data in so that the info graphic plug-in can interpret it to produce charts and graphs. Does anybody know of any open source software I can do that for coldfusion?
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While I have no experience with infographics to be able to recommend a specific solution, I will say I just looked around and found various options (free and commercial) that offered the ability to create them, and to pull in data via json (or csv, or other formats.)
You would be able to use CF to push (or pull) that data into such a tool. You may not find any reference to CF in such a tool, but as long as it showed how to configure a URL to obtain such data, you could point it to a CF page. Then it's up to you to learn how to cause a CF page to generate the format expected (json, etc.)
I will add a tip: before trying to point such a tool at such a CF URL, run that page on its own (in a browser) and make sure it works, returning the data you'd expect in the format expected.
There is also a useful cfcontent tag, where you could set the "mimetype" that the tool may expect, such as perhaps "application/json". You can find more about that in the CF docs or in various resources online. (You can also use a CFC with a method whose "returnformat" can be indicated to be "json".) But I will leave it at that for you to find a suitable solution for your needs.
But I will add one last tip: do make sure there is NO CF debugging output on the page, as the tool would choke on that: it wants JUST the data to be imported, not extraneous HTML like that. You can use the tag CFSETTING SHOWDEBUGOUTPUT="NO" on a page, to cause CF to turn off such debugging on that page (or of course you can turn it off in the CF Admin).
Hope that gets you going. If you find a solution, and perhaps resources to help you get going, share a link here for others who may find this question in the future.