plotly stacked bar chart with over 100 categories

Question

I have a dataset that contains over 100 categories. If I am going to plot it, I have to write over 100 lines code for it. Here is the example from plotly official website:

library(plotly)
Animals <- c("giraffes", "orangutans", "monkeys")
SF_Zoo <- c(20, 14, 23)
LA_Zoo <- c(12, 18, 29)
data <- data.frame(Animals, SF_Zoo, LA_Zoo)
p <- plot_ly(data, x = ~Animals, y = ~SF_Zoo, type = 'bar', name = 'SF Zoo') %>%
add_trace(y = ~LA_Zoo, name = 'LA Zoo') %>%
layout(yaxis = list(title = 'Count'), barmode = 'stack')

As you can see, if I have over 100 zoos that are going to be plotted, I need to write add_trace for over 100 times, which is inefficient. Does anyone know of ways to simplify it? I tried using for loop but I failed.

Or if anyone know how to use ggplotly to transfer a ggplot to an interactive format, it will also solve my problem. The plot produced by ggplot is a stacked grouped bar chart which x-axis have 10 facet_grid and about 100 categories in each grid. I tried using ggplotly directly and save it as an .html, however the plot's scale is very weird. It should looks like a rectangular with width about 40 and height about 8, but in html, it just shows like a square which is unreadable.

It sounds like you need to reshape your dataset into long format. This is the closest plotly question I found, but there are many ggplot2 questions and answers on this topic. — aosmith
@aosmith Thank you ;). But this is not what I am looking for. — Eleanor
Are you saying you don't want to reshape your dataset? You might clarify your question, then, including adding the ggplot2 code that made the plot you want that you want to reproduce in plotly. — aosmith
Please show us what you are looking for. You can add screenshots. — Parfait

M-- M-- · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-05T15:27:15

You can melt the data and then plot them like below:

library(data.table)  
library(plotly)

data.table::melt(data, id.vars='Animals') %>%
plot_ly(x = ~Animals, y = ~value, type = 'bar', 
                name = ~variable, color = ~variable) %>%
      layout(yaxis = list(title = 'Count'), barmode = 'stack')

This will plot:

enter image description here

plotly stacked bar chart with over 100 categories

1 Answers