Highcharts Cookbook

Highcharts Cookbook

By : Nicholas Terwoord

Buy this Book

Highcharts Cookbook

By: Nicholas Terwoord

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Highcharts is a JavaScript library that enables web developers to create a wide range of different, highly customized charts. Highcharts easily integrates with existing JavaScript frameworks and is simple enough to make a column chart in a few lines of code, but flexible enough to handle more complex charting scenarios such as viewing multiple chart types with different data sources on a multitude of devices and form-factors. "Highcharts Cookbook" is a practical guide that provides you with clear, step-by-step recipes to create dynamic, functional charts in your web applications using Highcharts. With "Highcharts Cookbook", you will create and design dynamic and versatile charts in different scenarios. "Highcharts Cookbook" through its wide array of recipes will walk you through everything you need to know about Highcharts and will enable you to unleash its full potential in your web applications quickly and easily. You will learn how to integrate Highcharts with different frontend and backend libraries such as ExtJS, jQuery, and the Yii framework with some examples in Python, PHP, and NodeJS. You will also cover how to handle user interactions like form input and mouse events, how to fetch remote data in CSV, XML, and JSON format, and how to render charts for offline usage. If you want to learn the different ways you can leverage the power of Highcharts to create, integrate and extend its features in your application, then this book is for you.

Highcharts Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Getting Started with Highcharts

Introduction

Finding documentation on Highcharts

Creating your first chart

Including multiple series in one chart

Displaying multiple charts in one graph

Using the same data in multiple charts

Creating spiderweb graphs for comparison

Creating custom tooltips

Adding extra content to tooltips

Making charts internationalizable/localizable

Creating a new theme

Creating reusable graphs

Processing Data

Introduction

Working with different data formats

Using AJAX for polling charts

Using WebSockets for real-time updates

Drilling down and filtering data

Using CSV, XML, or JSON with Highcharts

Handling cross-domain data

Handling dates

Handling User Interaction

Introduction

Creating a simple poll

Making graphs zoomable

Creating master details graphs

Slicing and dicing time data

Annotating a chart

Developing dynamic tooltips

Taking actions on other events

Adding events after the chart is rendered

Sharing Charts on the Web

Introduction

Rendering charts on the server side

Exporting images to different formats

E-mailing static charts

E-mailing dynamic charts

Preparing charts for printing

Integrating with ExtJS

Introduction

Setting up a simple ExtJS project

Using Highcharts in ExtJS

Connecting your chart using Ext.data.Store

Observing live data using other Store types

Connecting your chart to Ext.app.Controller

Creating charts that inherit from other charts

Integrating with jQuery

Introduction

Creating charts with jQuery

Using the data- attributes to load charts

Binding events using jQuery.on

Handling user interaction with jQuery

Updating a chart on the backend

Using jQuery UI tabs and Highcharts

Modifying charts using jQuery UI widgets

Putting charts in pages using jQuery Mobile

Integrating with the Yii Framework

Introduction

Setting up a simple Yii project

Creating a chart from model data

Generating a chart with a Yii CLI command

Creating charts with a RESTful controller

Updating the model when the chart changes

Integrating with Other Frameworks

Introduction

Using NodeJS as a data provider

Using Django as a data provider

Using Flask/Bottle as a data provider

Integrating with Backbone

Using AngularJS data bindings and controllers

Using NodeJS for chart rendering

Extending Highcharts

Introduction

Wrapping existing functions

Creating new chart types

Creating your own Highcharts extension

Adding new functions to your extension

JSHinting your code

Unit testing your new extension

Packaging your extension

Minifying your code

Math and Statistics

Introduction

Graphing equations

Showing descriptive statistics with box plots

Plotting distributions with jStat

Displaying experimental data with scatter plots

Displaying percentiles with area range graphs

System Integration

Introduction

Exploring hard drive usage

Understanding CPU and memory usage graphs

Showing Git commits by contributor

Showing Git commits over time

Other Inspirational Uses

Introduction

Demonstrating time zones with gauge charts

Exploring a Highcharts stopwatch

Counting words per minute

Measuring the distance travelled

Plotting tweets per day

Creating a compass

Creating a weight-watching application

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Creating a new theme

When working on charts, we may find that there is a set of colors that works well or that there are settings that we may want to use in other charts. This is where themes are helpful. Themes are just a collection of common options that we can apply to all charts.

How to do it...

To get started, follow the ensuing instructions:

Create an empty options object using the following code:
```
var myTheme = {};
```

Assign the properties we want in the theme, such as colors or a background color as follows:

myTheme.colors = ["#000000", "#ff0000", "#00ff00", "#0000ff"]
myTheme.chart = {
    backgroundColor: '#cccccc'
};
myTheme.title = {
    style: {
        fontSize: '20px',
        fontFamily: '"Georgia", "Verdana", sans-serif',
        fontWeight: 'bold',
        color: '#000000'
    }
}

Note

When all colors have been used, Highcharts will pull new colors from the beginning of the array.

Call Highcharts.setOptions to apply our theme to all charts using the following code:
```
Highcharts.setOptions(myTheme);
```
The following is the output chart:

How it works...

The Highcharts.setOptions function, as previously discussed, sets options globally; a theme is just a set of options that we want applied to all charts.

If we want to store the theme in a separate file, we only need to make a few small changes. First, we will create our theme in a new file. In this file, we will create our theme in the Highcharts namespace, include our theme file after highcharts.js on our main page, and call Highcharts.setOptions, as shown in the following code:

    // myTheme.js
    Highcharts.myTheme = {
        // Our theme goes here
    };
    
    // main page
    <script type='text/javascript' src='highcharts.js'></script>
    <script type='text/javascript' src='myTheme.js'></script>
    
    <script type='text/javascript'>
        // ... chart creation ...
        
        Highcharts.setOptions(Highcharts.myTheme);
        
        // ... chart rendering …
    </script>

There's more...

Highcharts provides a few basic themes out of the box. This includes grid, skies, gray, dark blue, and dark green, in addition to the default colors. They can be found in the themes folder and are included just as you would include any other theme. More details on theming can be found at http://highcharts.com/docs/chart-design-and-style/themes.

Highcharts Cookbook

By : Nicholas Terwoord

Highcharts Cookbook

By: Nicholas Terwoord

Overview of this book

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Current Title:

Highcharts Cookbook

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Note

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