PivotViewer to present data in a cool way

| November 05, 2010 | 2

I have tried the Silverlight control PivotViewer that can be used to present large amounts of data in a fun and intuitive way. Inspired by things like the Netflix Pivotviewer demo i have been wanting to do something with it. Gary Flake made a fantastic presentation on what can be done with this technology at TED 2010.

This is how the result looks!

Being completely useless in GUI design i liked the PivotViewer approach of having most of the look and feel in the control itself and all i had to do was to create a valid collection.

After finding a really good xml feed of items in the booli.se api, which presents Swedish real estate ads, i made a simple app converting that into Pivot Collection and the DeepZoom structure needed. Real estate ads and this control is a perfect match if you ask me. A big thanks to booli.se for providing this api.

To create the collection and help with DeepZoom i used the pAuthor C# library available on codeplex. When the collection and deepzoom stuff is ready to go it is just a matter of adding the control to a simple silverlight app and load the collection.

As an alternative to my approach of creating the collection using code you could generate it using XSLT or even by an Excel 2010 plugin.

Follow the link and you can see how it looks when finished. Try out the filtering on the left!

Click here to open the POC in a separate window!

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