The goal
What i need is one Flot chart that contains different coloured bars, with different coloured lines over the top.
Many questions answer how to achieve different coloured bars.
And many pages answer how to add bars AND lines.
But i want to combine these two solutions.
An added bonus would be to be able to add custom parameters to each bar / line (see the "testId" example below) - however this is not necessarily required, as a workaround I could create an object on page load that references each bar's position (e.g. the "ticks" array).
My current workaround
I can already achieve this using multiple data sets as seen in this jFiddle, which i have constructed based off this answer's jFiddle, however this requires multiple different data sets per colour variant of each bar / line like so:
var dataBarsRed = {
data: [
[0, 1],
[2, 1.9],
],
color: 'red'
};
var dataBarsOrange = {
data: [
[1, 2],
[3, 3.9],
],
color: 'orange'
};
var dataBarsGreen = {
data: [
[4, 4],
[5, 4.5]
],
color: 'green'
};
var dataLineRed = {
data: [
[0, 2, 2],
[1, 2, 2],
[2, 2, 2],
[3, 2, 2],
[4, 2, 2],
[5, 2, 2],
],
label: '60% efficiency',
color: 'red',
bars: {
barWidth: 1
}
};
var dataLineOrange = {
data: [
[0, 4, 4],
[1, 4, 4],
[2, 4, 4],
[3, 4, 4],
[4, 4, 4],
[5, 4, 4],
],
label: '85% efficency',
color: 'orange',
bars: {
barWidth: 1
}
};
And add them like so:
$.plot("#placeholder", [dataBarsRed, dataBarsOrange, dataBarsGreen, dataLineRed, dataLineOrange],...
From what i can tell, there is no way to add any custom data parameters to this data structure, in which each item has it's own set of custom variables (e.g. object id's to link to the back-end, like "testId" - see "The Rationale").
The rationale
Is there a way to achieve what i need using the same structure for the bar data as the first link:
var data = [
{ data: [[0,1]], color: "red", testId: 30 },
{ data: [[1,2]], color: "yellow", testId: 31 },
{ data: [[2,3]], color: "green", testId: 32 }
];
The reason i'd like to do it this way is that it would be much simpler to build the Flot Data Object on the Java side (return it as JSON from ajax) but also it has the added benefit of adding your own parameters to each bar / line (e.g. "testId" shown above. The id's themselves would be utilised to retrieve more data via ajax on click or hover of the bar.
For Example:
$(container).bind('plothover', function(event, position, item){
console.log(item.series.testId)
});
Final thoughts
I feel like i'm going round in circles with this. I love the Flot charts plugin and it's flexibility, but there are numerous ways to implement the same visual outcome.
Thanks.
- Steve.
