<CFCHART> inside <CFPRESENTATION>/<CFPRESENTATIONSLIDE>

[j_stevenson]

Hello all:

Finally upgraded to CF9 for the purposes of building dynamic PowerPoint presentations.  I'm almost there but one problem still blocks my way:

When I try to call any kind of <CFCHART>, with even the simplest of hard-coded numbers and labels, located within a <CFPRESENTATION>/<CFPRESENTATIONSLIDE> tag series where the FORMAT parameter = "ppt" (PowerPoint), I get a box with a black "X" inside.  I've run into this problem with  when accessing this routine in an SSL region of my site.  I've since moved everything into a non-SSL directory structure - images now load correctly, but the chart still doesn't display.  The other weird thing about this is if I set the FORMAT parameter to "html", everything works fine.  The chart comes up and the slide looks perfect.  There seems to be some kind of functional incongruity between how HTML pages are built and how PPT slides are built using the <CFPRESENTATION> tag and I'm curious if anyone knows what might be the reason for this.  All the Adobe help pages show examples using <CFCHART> within <CFPRESENTATION> (although they don't specify "PPT" as the output format, interestingly), so I'm making an educated assertion that it should work. 

Update: I also attempted to change the charting cache location to a non-SSL directory.  The charts save to the new location successfully but the problem still persists for PPT export - the  won't display.  HTML output still works fine.  Hoping someone has used this before and knows what may be going wrong.

Any info appreciated - thanks much in advance!

[Sean Coyne · Accepted solution]

You can use cfchart to create a PNG image which you could write to the disk and then display in the HTML as you would any other image.  Simply use the "name" attribute on the cfchart tag.  It will save the chart as binary data to the variable specified in the name attribute.  You could then write it out to an image file and display with an <img ... /> tag.

[j_stevenson]

Interesting.  I will give that a shot.  Thanks very much for the suggestion!

[j_stevenson]

Update - that worked!  I am able to pull the chart graphics using this method.  Thank you VERY much!