Google Charts is an extremely stable and reliable web-based charting engine that is perfect for dropping into any project where you quickly want to produce some high quality graphs for your end user.

The default way to generate a Google Chart is to simple create a normal image tag and set its source to the Google API script with all the chart options passed along as a GET request string.

Of course, as we all know, there is a limit to the length of a GET string and so the question is raised once you start generating bigger graphs, how do you get around this particular limitation?

Well the answer of course lies in using a POST request instead, and thanks to PHP’s explicit support for POST requestes, this becomes as easy as pie! :)

Swiping the demo code straight from Google’s documentation because I’m too lazy to paste my own development example, you can see that the PHP script which handles the generation is nothing more than a file that pushes through the appropriate image content header (in this case a png) and then makes use of the classic fopen functionality (ensure that remote URL access is enabled on your server) to pull down the generated image from Google’s Chart API, specifically setting a POST stream context to handle the chart parameters stored in the previously created data array.

The final leg of work is then of course to simply reference your PHP script as the src of an image tag on the page you want the actual graph to appear.

PHP Chart Script:

  // Create some random text-encoded data for a line chart.
  header('content-type: image/png');
  $url = 'http://chart.apis.google.com/chart';
  $chd = 't:';
  for ($i = 0; $i < 150; ++$i) {
    $data = rand(0, 100000);
    $chd .= $data . ',';
  }
  $chd = substr($chd, 0, -1);

  // Add data, chart type, chart size, and scale to params.
  $chart = array(
    'cht' => 'lc',
    'chs' => '600x200',
    'chds' => '0,100000',
    'chd' => $chd);

  // Send the request, and print out the returned bytes.
  $context = stream_context_create(
    array('http' => array(
      'method' => 'POST',
      'content' => http_build_query($chart))));
  fpassthru(fopen($url, 'r', false, $context));

HTML Page to Display Chart:

Simple, but remarkably effective and thus clever! :P

Related Link: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/docs/post_requests.html