2.4. Starting Chart Designer

Chart Designer can be run in two ways, as a stand-alone application, or as an applet loaded through a Web browser. In either case, you must have EspressManager running in order to start Chart Designer. Please see the previous section for instructions on starting EspressManager.

Running as an application

To start Chart Designer as an application executes the Designer.bat or Designer.sh file located in the root directory of the EspressChart installation. For Windows installations you can use of the program shortcuts that were added to the start menu or onto the desktop depending on the options that were specified during installation. A dialog will appear prompting you to enter a user name and password. If you have set up users in the config.txt file enter your user name and password. If you have not set up users, enter the user name guest and password guest. Click Start EspressChart and the application will start.

Chart Designer Login Window

Running through a Browser

If you're running Chart Designer remotely make sure that EspressManager is running on the remote machine then type the URL for EspressChart in your browser. i.e. http://machinename/espresschart/EspressChart.jsp. The page will contain a dialog prompting you to log on to EspressManager. If the config.txt file has been modified to set up users, enter your user name and password to log in. If the config.txt file has not been modified, enter the user name guest with no password. Click Start EspressChart and the Chart Designer will load.

[Caution]Caution

Because EspressChart requires a JVM the equivalent of JDK 1.2 or higher, you will need to download the Java plug-in in order to run Chart Designer through a browser.

2.4.1. Connecting to EspressManager Running as a Servlet

If EspressManager is running as a servlet as described in Section 2.3.1 - Starting EspressManager as a Servlet you will need to make some modifications before ChartDesigner can be started successfully.

Stand-Alone

If you're running ChartDesigner from the .bat or .sh file, you will need to modify the file to indicate that EspressChart is running as a servlet, and to point to the location of the EspressManager servlet. To do this adds the following argument to the .bat or .sh file -servlet:http://IP Address:Port/Context.

For example:

-servlet:http://127.0.0.1:8080/servlet would indicate that the EspressManager is running on localhost, port 8080 in the /servlet/ context.

Browser

If you're running ChartDesigner through an applet that is connecting to EspressManager running as a servlet, you will need to modify the HTML source of the index.html start-up page. The following parameter tags need to be added within the applet:

<PARAM NAME="comm_protocol" VALUE="servlet">
<PARAM NAME="comm_url" VALUE="http://127.0.0.1:8080">
<PARAM NAME="servlet_context" VALUE="servlet">

The first parameter indicates that EspressManager is running as a servlet. The second is the IP address and port number that the application server is using, and the third is the servlet context under which EspressManager is deployed.

To connect to the ChartDesigner either open index.html file from the <EspressChart Installation Directory> directory in Web browser or if you want to make the ChartDesigner available via http, copy /lib/ directory and index.html file (both under <EspressChart Installation Directory< directory) to the <Tomcat Installation Directory>/webapps/ROOT/EspressChart directory and restart your Tomcat server.

To access the ChartDesigner via http, just open Web browser and go to the following address: http://127.0.0.1:8080/EspressChart/index.html.