eZ component: Graph: Multiple axis, Design
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

:Author:   $Author: kn $
:Revision: $Revision: 5847 $
:Date:     $Date: 2007-08-08 12:26:43 +0200 (Wed, 08 Aug 2007) $

Introduction
============

Description
-----------

Multiple axis are used in three different cases.

- In stock chart, for example, they are used to show a different meaning of 
  the displayed data, for example the value of a single stock option and the
  value sum of the complete company.

- Another case multiple axis may be used, is displaying relating data in one
  chart which has completely different scalings or units, like the used RAM 
  and the load on a machine.

- A third case multiple axis could be used for, are named separators to
  highlight data borders in your chart. In this case the step labels should be
  at least optional.

Requirements
============

From an implementation point of view the feature seperates into two different
APIs we need to define.

Adding additional axis
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When adding additional axis we want to support a finite number of marker axis,
at every possible position in the chart.

::

	$marker = new ezcGraphChartElementLabeledAxis();
	$marker->position = ezcGraph::LEFT;
	$marker->chartPosition = .4;

	$chart->additionalAxis[] = $marker;

The property $position is already used by ezcGraphChartElement to indicate the
overall position and accepts bitmasks of LEFT, RIGHT, BOTTOM and TOP. For Axis
this indicates the base point of the axis and for additional axis it will
define wheather the new axis is an X or Y axis in the cartesian coordinate
system of bar and line charts.

As the property $position is already used the property $chartPosition
indicates the position of the axis in the charts data section. A value of 1
will place the axis at the very end, and a value of 0 at the very beginning of
the data.

In the example above ezcGraph::LEFT means that the axis is drawn from the left
to the right, so it is an additional x axis, and the $chartPosition indicates
the position at 40% of the chart data bounding height.

Adding data for additional axis
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Data may be added explicitely on one of the additional axis to use different
scaling und units for this dataset. The axis values are received from the data
sets when rendering the charts, so that we are able to define the usage of an
additional axis at any point before rendering.

::

	$chart->data['foo'] = new ezcGraphArrayDataSet( ... );
	$chart->data['foo']->xAxis = $marker; // See last example
	$chart->data['foo']->yAxis = $chart->yAxis; // Redundant

The assignement of additional axis is optional and if none was defined the
original common chart axis will be used. You may define custom axis for one or
both axis.

Special consideration
=====================

You may of course define custom scaling, custom axis types and custom axis
label rendering algorithms for each of the used axis.

If no data set has been assigned to a axis it will not render any labels by
using the ezcGraphAxisNoLabelRenderer. Otherwise the assigned data will be
used the common way to calculate some default step sizes.


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