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Customizing Chartbuilder

You may want to alter some of Chartbuilder's basic style and settings for your organization. That's what we'll cover here.

As noted in the introduction to Chartbuilder's internals, we made as many style options as possible configurable through CSS. Nearly all other settings can be configured in one of two places in JavaScript:

  1. The global config files in the src/js/config directory
  2. The configuration file for each chart type, for example xy-config.js in src/js/charts/cb-xy.

chart-style.js

Style configuration that is global to all chart types is defined in src/js/config/chart-style.js. In order for your chart to render correctly, you will need to set fontFamilies and fontSizes in this file. Some aspects of the chart require measuring the size of rendered text, and defining it in javascript here allows us to calculate that size before drawing the text, much faster than drawing it first then checking and drawing again.

Colors and other CSS

CSS will be able to cover most of the prominent aesthetic features of your charts: the color palette, typography, appearance of lines and dots, and more. Let's look at editing the colors.

Nearly all the colors used anywhere in Chartbuilder are defined in styl/colors.styl. There's an array of colors defined there, $chart-colors. Changing these values will update the color palette used for your charts, including the interface. There's one thing to note, however: our JavaScript has no way of knowing how many colors it ought to render, so you'll need to make sure the numColors value in your chart config matches the number of colors defined in colors.styl. The number of colors is set per chart type, in case some types have different requirements.

The colors.styl file also contains variables for various other colors used in Chartbuilder, so edit them at will. You can find typography definitions in type.styl. The visual elements of the charts themselves are defined in chart-renderer.styl.

Chart properties

Each chart type has its own config file. Currently in Chartbuilder there are such files for an XY chart (line, column, dots, or any combination of these) and a Chart Grid (repeated small multiples). Each config file has the following properties to keep in mind:

  • displayName: Name used on the button for selecting this chart
  • parser: A function that processes the input and parses it for use with the chart editor and renderer.
  • config: Settings that are specific to this chart type, and are static, meaning they don't change over time. Settings that are set in "ems" will be calculated based on the rendered size of a chart's type.
  • defaultProps: Where the default properties for your chart model are set.

The chart model

A chart consists of chartProps and metadata. The former tell the chart renderer how to draw the chart itself, while metadata relates to the area around the chart, such as the title, credit, and source. By convention, chartProps that are specific to a certain chart type start with an underscore, like chartProps._grid in chart grid. Properties that are shared across chart types will be carried over when changing types.

Here is further explanation of these properties (a sample is shown below):

input: An object containing the raw input as well as a status code indicating whether there have been any parse errors.

scale: Settings related to the chart's scales. The primaryScale should be used for the main linear scale in order for settings to carry over from one chart type to another. This isolates the primary scale from others, such as dates or a secondary scale for a chart with multiple y axes.

chartSettings: Any additional configuration that should be changeable via a chart editor. These are mostly used for properties specific to each column of a dataset, such as the color or display type.

Some properties need to be calculated; the config file merely sets the defaults. It is up to the chart parser to do any necessary calculations. For example, here is a model of an XY chart after it has been parsed by js/charts/cb-xy/parse-xy.js.