Set Minimum Y Value on Raw Run Time Graphs to Reflect Actual Data Minimum

[kinson]

See https://github.com/PragTob/benchee_html/issues/7

Hello @PragTob I have been looking through the plot.ly documentation and it appears that y0 is meant to be as an alternative to y -- which accepts the array of run time data -- and thus will not fit this solution. The next best option I have found is a range layout setting. Implementing this setting to satisfy the requirements of this issue requires using it's minimum and maximum values and then applying the arithmetic in the original issue post to get a revised minimum value for the y axis. I have done this in my pull request in the javascript assets.

[kinson]

Let me know if you want me to proceed with writing a test. If I were to do so would I be testing the generated html files (I guess actually the benchee.js file)?

[PragTob]

:wave:

The tests look at the generated HTML but it's hard to guess with the JS. We might want to/need to add js tests but that's obviously to big for this ticket :) So, no test should be good enough here. I also have a plan to add wallaby testing. Should put that into an issue.

Also apparently github is case sensitive so it needs to be @PragTob :D

I'll check this branch out and see how the results look like :)

Thanks a lot for digging into this! :tada:

[PragTob]

Can we make the value of the "base" y axis show up in the bottom left? Or some sort of hint that we don't start at 0? Right now people could still mistake it. I mean, with the hovering it's easy to discover but if we just had another indicator for the base line I think it'd be clearer :)

[kinson]

I've been looking at a couple ways to do this and would love some feedback about which approach would be better suited for this feature:

• The first thing I tried was to manually add a 0 value to the y axis. After looking at the y axis documentation for ticks I realized that if y0 is set, dtick must also be set to determine the spacing between ticks. This would result in having arbitrary (uniformly spaced) values along the y axis since the y0 is not necessarily a round number. Another way to use ticks to get a y0 label is to manually set each tick. This issue I see here is that this would require writing a robust function for calculating each tick based on the maximum and minimum y value that is well tested and handles any pair of min/max values and results in a well laid out graph. This is definitely doable but may be in the scope of another pr.
• A second approach I have taken is trying to use an annotation. Annotations allow arbitrary one off notes about the data but I am having issues aligning the actual annotation with the other y axis labels. Right now I am using the following annotation and get an annotation that shifts the axis over. Were there to be a logical place to put this annotation that doesn't obfuscate the graph but still informs the user that it does not start at 0 that could be a good solution to this problem.

annotations: [{ x: 0, y: minY, text: parseInt(minY), showarrow: false, xref: "x", yref: "y", xshift: -25 }]

@PragTob @devonestes I would appreciate any feedback here! Thanks for your time reviewing this pr and answering my questions!

[PragTob]

@kinson the shown approach (I think it's the second one you mentioned) looks good enough for me :) The first indeed sounds to complicated imo. Thanks for taking all the time to research this and put time into this!

[kinson]

I just updated it to include the shown approach. Since this change displaces the y axis a little bit, should this something that could be disabled with a flag? Here is a screenshot again of the resulting graph with this most recent commit

[PragTob]

@kinson thanks a ton! Phew... I know I have a lot of configuration options but I really don't want to have it :D So, honestly - until someone complains I'd keep it. And if someone complains we could look again if we could find another way to circumvent this problem. And only then would I add an option :)

So, I'm gonna hit merge :rocket:

[kinson]

@PragTob & @devonestes thanks for your guidance on this!