Allow X-Axis Values to be Strings?

[stinkycheeseman]

Hey-

I would get a lot of value out of the ability to plot with x-axis values being strings. Is there any plan on implementing this functionality?

Eg: [ [ "apples", 40], ["bananas": 23], ["carrots": 19] ]

[cesutherland]

Hello stinky cheese man-

what output are you trying to get?

-c

[stinkycheeseman]

I would like to get a chart whose x-axis is non-numeric like this: http://humblesoftware.com/flotr2/#!basic-timeline

Except I do not want to pass in a custom formatter. Ideally I could just pass in the string values I would like in the x-axis.

[cesutherland]

The ticks option ought to get you where you want to go:

http://jsfiddle.net/cesutherland/CYZ5s/

[stinkycheeseman]

Thanks CE,

This is exactly the effect I'd like, though I feel that passing in ["stinkycheeseman", 5] as a datapoint should also work. It doesn't feel natural to me to have to send in a placeholder numeric value only to override it in the "ticks" option.

Flotr.draw(container, [ [ ["stinky", 1], [ "cheese", 2], ["man", 3] ] ]);

should draw a chart where the x-axis contains string values. I think this is much cleaner and more intuitive than

Flotr.draw(container, [ [ [1, 1], [2, 1], [3, 1] ] ], { "ticks": [ [1, "stinky"], [2, "cheese"], [3, "man"] ] });

(for the record I don't want to seem really critical, I think this library is great and you've done a wonderful job with it)

[cesutherland]

No worries, thank you for the feedback! Much of the API (like this portion) was inherited from the original Flotr, so it'll stay as-is unfortunately. The graphing packages of the future will have much cleaner APIs to be certain.

[stinkycheeseman]

Cool- what's the expected timeframe for these packages of the future?

[cesutherland]

I was speaking more in general! I don't have or know a specific timeframe.

Marking this one resolved!