Administering charts

Use the ColdFusion Administrator to administer charts. In the Administrator, you can choose to save cached charts in memory or to disk. You can also specify the number of charts to cache, the number of charting threads, and the disk file for caching images to disk.

ColdFusion caches charts as they are created. In that way, repeated requests of the same chart load the chart from the cache rather than having ColdFusion render the chart over and over again.

Note: You do not have to perform any special coding to reference a cached chart. Whenever you use the cfchart tag, ColdFusion inspects the cache to see if the chart has already been rendered. If so, ColdFusion loads the chart from the cache.

The following table describes the settings for the ColdFusion charting and graphing engine:

Option

Description

Cache Type

Sets the cache type. Charts can be cached in memory or to disk. Caching in memory is faster, but more memory intensive.

Maximum number of images in cache

Specifies the maximum number of charts to store in the cache. When the limit is reached, the oldest chart in the cache is deleted to make room for a new one. The maximum number of charts you can store in the cache is 250.

Max number of charting threads

Specifies the maximum number of chart requests that can be processed concurrently. The minimum number is 1 and the maximum is 5. Higher numbers are more memory-intensive.

Disk cache location

When caching to disk, specifies the directory in which to store the generated charts.