Overview

Plotly is a popular graphing and charting library that Rich Data Services serializes to. However, unlike amCharts and Google Charts, Plotly charts will expect different formats based on the type of chart that is being used. Due to this users will have to be specific with how they want the data formatted.

Supported Formats

PLOTLY_AREA	Area Graph
PLOTLY_BAR	Bar Chart
PLOTLY_BOXPLOT	Box Plot
PLOTLY_BUBBLE	Bubble Chart
PLOTLY_HIST	Histogram
PLOTLY_H_BAR	Horizontal Bar Chart
PLOTLY_H_HIST	Horizontal Histogram
PLOTLY_LINE	Line Chart
PLOTLY_PIE	Pie Chart
PLOTLY_SCATTER	Scatter Plot
PLOTLY_TS	Time Series

Formatting Tabulations

In this example we will create a dataProvider object that can be used with amCharts. We will assume that we have a collection named test and a view named view with a variable named var that has the values 1, 2, and 3. In this example we will run a tabulation that will count the frequencies of each of these values that could be used to create a chart.

Running the tabulation would normally look something like this:

Tabulation

http://{host}/rds/api/catalog/test/view/tabulate?dims=var

Tabulation Output

 {
    "records": [
        [
            1,
            182
        ],
        [
            2,
            354
        ],
        [
            3,
            126
        ]
    ],
    "info": {
        "colCount": 2,
        "format": "MTNA",
        "includeMetadata": false,
        "limit": 20,
        "offset": 0,
        "moreRows": false
    }
}

We can look at some of the formatting changes by running several of the different formats.

Pie Chart

http://{host}/rds/api/catalog/test/view/tabulate?dims=var&format=plotly_pie

Pie Output

 [
    {
        "values": [
            182,
            354,
            126
        ],
        "labels": [
            "1",
            "2",
            "3"
        ],
        "type": "pie"
    }
]

Bar Chart

http://{host}/rds/api/catalog/test/view/tabulate?dims=var&format=plotly_bar

Bar Output

[
    {
        "x": [
            1,
            2,
            3
        ],
        "y": [
            182,
            354,
            126
        ],
        "type": "bar"
    }
]

In addition to formatting the values in a Plotly compliant way, we can also substitute the numeric values for the categories they represent if the variable has a classification associated with it. In this example we will assume that var has the following classification:

1	METROPOLITAN AREA
2	TOWN OR CITY
3	OPEN COUNTRY

Pie Chart

http://{host}/rds/api/catalog/test/view/tabulate?dims=var&format=plotly_pie

Pie Output

[
    {
        "values": [
            182,
            354,
            126
        ],
        "labels": [
            "METROPOLITAN AREA",
            "TOWN OR CITY",
            "OPEN COUNTRY"
        ],
        "type": "pie"
    }
]

Bar Chart

http://{host}/rds/api/catalog/test/view/tabulate?dims=var&format=plotly_bar

Bar Output

[
    {
        "x": [
            "METROPOLITAN AREA",
            "TOWN OR CITY",
            "OPEN COUNTRY"
        ],
        "y": [
            182,
            354,
            126
        ],
        "type": "bar"
    }
]