Charts - some thoughts

[Offbeatmammal]

just to get discussions rolling on charts, there are some things I'd like to see as a ChartJS user

basic charts would include:

• bar
• stacked bar
• line
• combo (bar + line)
• pie/donut
• treemap
• packed circle
• bubble/scatter
• wordcloud

Tooltips, data labels, and axis labels would be built-in, and all objects (including axis labels) would be stylable and can have events attached (eg click on the bars label to hide the bar, or perform a custom action).

[KonnorRogers]

Thank you! This is helpful to know what users are looking for in charts.

Charts have a massive scope, and theres a number of libraries to choose from so we're definitely evaluating tradeoffs of each library and finding a nice middleground between power, ease of use, and features

[wazzamatazz]

Something that charting libraries often overlook is that source data is not always in a nice, tabulated format. This is especially true when visualising time series data from industrial processes where the data to display might be a best-fit representation of raw samples over a time range instead of e.g. averages calculated at a fixed interval. You can often end up with each series covering the same time range but having completely different timestamps for each sample.

If you use something like ChartJS to visualise each series in its own line chart you have to jump through a lot of hoops to make the charts render to the same size because of how things like ticks and labels get generated on both X- and Y-axes. To this end, it would be great if it was possible to link multiple charts together so that things like label widths, X-axis ticks and so on were computed taking the properties of all of the charts into account.

[HovKlan-DH]

These graphs would be nice too:

• A simple Gantt (no need for dependency mapping from my point of view)
• Heatmap
• Gauges in various forms

Furthermore these functionalities should be carefully considered also:

• Time series data (massive amount of data)
• Realtime data update

[SteveR1954]

My one hope for charts is that they will be friendly with PHP and MySQL.

[Offbeatmammal]

I'd say that as they'll be client side, they'll be the same as ChartJS etc - the current in-house solution I work with drives those from PHP/MySQL and we've largely built a library of functions to respond to ajax calls to get the data in the format we need for our charts.

[SteveR1954]

Thank you, offbeatmammal.