# Interactive Knife Steel Composition Chart



## Dave Martell

Interactive Knife Steel Composition Chart by Gator


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## Gator

New versions - Knife Steel Chart 4.1 and Graph Builder 3.8 went online today. You will need to clear browser cache in order to get correct new functionality. Normally Shift+click on Reload does the trick, although in some cases you may have to clear browser cache manually.

Mainly user interface updates, fixed settings dialog for the steel chart. All dialog windows are now modal, i.e. prevent users from clicking in the wrong places before completing dialog action. Fixed few bugs in both chart and graph.

Internet Explorer 8 support is officially dropped. For the reasons explained below. It will still work for small charts, i.e. queries that return less than 300 records or so.

Added about two dozen new alloy names, which means more than 5000 alloys in the chart.

NOTE - In the knife steel chart, please use Settings dialog to set default standard to something other than "All" which for now is the default. In other words, as it is, chart loads all 5000 names grouped by compositions, and I really doubt someone needs to look at all 5000 of them at once. Search functionality is quite well developed in the chart, there are menus to access listings by standard, country, maker name or technology. Search itself works against entire database and there are actually 2 types of search, simple and advanced. Given all that, selecting particular standard as a default will greatly improve initial chart loading speed. 
For the record, IE8 can't even load complete chart, because of the large number of alloy objects. And I suspect in many cases that is the reason people are not finding alloys like CPM S30V in the chart, trying to dig it up in thousands of names.
Partly it is my fault, in the initial design I never expected 5000+ alloys in the chart. 

Let me assure you, default standard setting doesn't affect search capabilities and at any moment you run search against entire database  What this settings do is to narrow alloy list from everything in the database to something more manageable when there are no search parameters specified i.e. going directly to - http://zknives.com/knives/steels/steelchart.php
For now, settings allow selection of one of the 17 standards or "All", but in the future I will add settings selections for countries as well, or even makers. This is all very similar to what you have in mobile versions of the steel chart. 
Settings are stored in the cookie. If you have them disabled, please make exception for zknives.com.

In the future, I suppose that will be steel chart 5, the users will be reminded to set settings, dialog will pop up and ask the user to make the selection, although even in that case you still can select "All" as default, if your browser can handle it and you are ok with waiting...

Thanks again to everyone who sent new steel info, found bugs and suggested new features.


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## Gator

New versions - Knife Steel Chart 4.5 and Graph Builder 4.0 went online today. You will need to clear browser cache in order to get correct new functionality. Normally Shift+click on Reload does the trick, although in some cases you may have to clear browser cache manually.

Main effort was to improve the performance of the steel chart, and improve keyboard support.

Bulk of javascript and some of the server side code was rewritten. Overall performance improved between 20-30% for load and initial rendering. Table layout was changed to fixed type to improve rendering as well.
Still, for the full chart performance is low, unless you're using really powerful computer IE9 and IE10 have hard time scrolling and take long time to render full table.

Same advise as before, use settings dialog to set up more manageable setup. Chrome, Opera and Firefox are more or less ok. 

Keyboard shortcuts were designed Windows platform, some of them won't work on Macs. I'll see what i can do later on.


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## Gator

Hi All,

Web version updates posted. Fixes, speed improvements and new functionality.

Knife steel composition chart 4.51:
Fixed bug in settings dialog. I'd strongly recommend to set default standard to specific choice instead of having *All* which results in about 6000 names to load. 
Specifying default standard reduces page load times significantly.
Searches are run against entire database, so by limiting initial recordset set you are not limiting search scope. Sooner or later I
have to enforce standard choice anyway. Server is having hard time coping with the load.
Speed improvements, during long queries appropriate messages are displayed. 

Knife Steel Comparison And Analyzer Graph 4.10:
When displaying multiple alloys, notes are included using the same mouse hover method used in the steel chart. Alloys with notes are marked with * and mouse over displays floating window with the note. 
Fixed an issue with duplicate names. E.g. searching X90CrMoV18 will display comparison of 5 alloys, all named X90CrMoV18, but in the table below the graph, click on an individual alloy name takes to correct database entry.
Added support for more flexible URL schema to view individual alloys, e.g. X90CrMoV18 has 5 matches, and url http://zknives.com/knives/steels/X90CrMoV18.shtml takes you to German DIN standard spec for X90CrMoV18, but if you add either country code, or standard code or maker name after /steels/ part, you can specify more precisely which of the X90CrMoV18 entries you want:
http://zknives.com/knives/steels/eu/X90CrMoV18.shtml - for EU specification, where EU is two letter country code for euro union, or:
http://zknives.com/knives/steels/uni/X90CrMoV18.shtml - UNI where UNI is Italian steel standards specification, taking you to UNI spec for X90CrMoV18 steel.
Table below the graph has links defined as above.


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## Crothcipt

Wow who knew there was such differences. Thx again Gator for creating a great tool.


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## Gator

Site is back up, running ok. Got probs upgrading the server 
Thanks for support and understanding.
Let me know if you encounter any issues.


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## HHH Knives

Gator. Your the man! Your site is awesome. and I gota say THANKS. I use it alot and have found it a very helpful tool. 

Blessings
Randy


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## apathetic

Thanks for the updates Gator, this is really useful!


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## Gator

Doing my best for the knife community  Glad it's working.
More to come...


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## andoniminev

Great site, Great tool! Great job!


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