Override tick interval calculation in Highcharts?

Question

Highcharts does a great job figuring out appropriate tick intervals.

However, I have a "duration" series (in ms), which I format e.g. like "3y 6M" or "1d 3h" or "3h 30min" for display. Because Highcharts is optimizing the tick intervals for the ms value (e.g. 10,000,000ms), I end up with awkward values such as [ 2h 46min 40s, 5h 33min 20s, 8h 20min ] rather than [ 3h, 6h, 9h ].

Can I get Highcharts to prefer multiples of certain values (e.g. 1000, 60 * 1000, 60 * 60 * 1000 etc)? I'd rather not have to calculate the exact tick interval myself (depends on chart size etc).

unformated y-axis values formatted y-axis values

There's no datetime involved, just a string category label, and an integer duration value (milliseconds). — ejain
and you're saying that you don't want to calibrate tickInterval? I'm unclear as to how you DO want the interval to be; just rounded off or something? — Sualkcin
Yes, instead of setting a tickInterval (ugly as I'd need to analyze the data and handle resizing etc), I'd rather override the code that is used to calculate the tick intervals--if Highcharts lets me do that. — ejain
You can dynamically create your own variable to use for the tickInterval value. i.e. tickInverval: $myCalculatedValue. other than that, you might want to try a datetime axis which allows you to set a pointInvterval such as 1 day or 1 hour, etc. — Sualkcin

Paweł Fus Paweł Fus · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-15T10:05:40

I think you should consider using datetime axis for yAxis. For example: http://jsfiddle.net/jRGvs/

    yAxis: {
        type: 'datetime'
    },

    series: [{
        type: 'column',
        name: 'Column',
        data: [Date.UTC(1970, 0, 1, 2, 30), 
               Date.UTC(1970, 0, 1, 1, 45), 
               Date.UTC(1970, 0, 1, 4, 10), 
               Date.UTC(1970, 0, 1, 3, 30)]
    }]

Override tick interval calculation in Highcharts?

2 Answers