In addition to the standard background image you can also add an arbitrary number
of icons onto the background of the graph. These icons are created with a call to
the special Plot class IconPlot defined in the module
"jpgraph_iconplot.php". The image which is the base of the
icons can be
an arbitrary image from a file
one of the built-in country flags
The basic structure of adding an icon somewhere on the graph is to first create an
instance of the IconPlot class and then position the icon at the wanted x,y-position
on the graph and finally add the object to the graph using the standard
Graph::Add() method. The constructor for the IconPlot class have
the following signature
__construct($aFile='',$aX=0,$aY=0,$aScale=1.0,$aMix=100)The parameters should be self explanatory. The
$aMixfactor specifies the degree of alpha blending between the background and the icon. A value of 100 means no blending and a value of 0 means that the icon is not shown at all, only the background.
Some useful methods in this class are
SetCountryFlag($aFlag,$aX=0,$aY=0,$aScale=1.0,$aMix=100,$aStdSize=3)This method specifies that the specified country flag should be used
SetPos($aX,$aY)Same as the optional arguments in th constructor. The coordinates are specified as absolute pixels where (0,0) is the top left corner.
CreateFromString($aStr)Creates the image from a string instead of reading it from a file.
SetScalePos($aX,$aY)Specifes the potision using the scale coordinate as specified by the x- and y-scales
SetAnchor($aXAnchor='left',$aYAnchor='center')Sets the anchor point of the icon, i.e. the position in the icon that should be aligned with the specified icon position in the graph.
The following short example shows how an icon is created and added to a graph
1 2 3 | $icon = new IconPlot('myimage.png',0.2,0.3,1,30);
$icon->SetAnchor('center','center');
$graph->Add($icon); |
It is possible to control how much of the icon should be blended into the background by specifying a percentage (1-100). The example below in Figure 14.84 shows how to mix in the picture of "Tux the penguin" into the background of a filled line graph.
Figure 14.84. Mixing an icon image into the background of the graph. The area plot in the graph uses alpha blending to achieve see-through affect ( lineiconex1.php)
To specify any of the roughly 200 country flags as an icon the first step is to
create an empty Icon and then call the IconPlot::SetCountryFlag()
method with the appropriate parameters. This is illustrated below by adding the
Icelandic flag into the background as an icon.
Caution
Some older versions of PHP (< 4.3.3 using the built-in GD) have problems rendering blended images. If you have this problem then you need to upgrade to a more recent version of PHP.