What is the future of Charts in CiviReport?

[Eileen]

I have created a new report for PTP using the stacked bar chart & have been kicking the tyres on Open Flash Chart quite a bit.

One thing that concerns me is that it is no longer maintained & even patches that have been submitted 2 years ago have not been incorporated. (although I note that it has had recent donations). I'm assuming that there is perhaps an alternative that has taken the lead - perhaps Google Charts?

Does anyone have any knowledge on the likely direction here?

[Eileen]

Lobo passed me this link

http://javascripted.me/top-5-free-javascript-chart-libraries.html#.UT5KUnE-sak

I think the 2 most likely in there are
JQPlot  http://www.jqplot.com/
Google Charts https://developers.google.com/chart/

[xavier]

The library the cool kids use to do sexy infographic is D3 (but not that easy to learn, I'm discovering the hard way).

Fortunately, there is nvd3, a more high level library built on the top of it that makes it easy(ier) for mere mortals to generate nice graphs

http://nvd3.org/ghpages/examples.html

not sure if it's what you need, but:
http://nvd3.org/ghpages/multiBar.html

[Eileen]

Apart from adding to our street cred are there advantages of that package over the google one?

[xavier]

1) You are not sending data to google. Not saying they do analyse the contribution amount you send them for the graphs, but hey, it's google.

2) Some users (eg. wikimedia) don't want to rely on external services

3) They seem to shut down services on a regular basis (cf. their google rss reader or caldav). Graph might be the next one to fall.

I'll look soon at report and datavisualisation of contributions and will try the d3 road, will let you know.

X+

[Donald Lobo]

in response to 1, i think the new versions are all on the client side and does not involve talking to the google servers

lobo

[xavier]

Hi,

Tested with the demo of pie chart, doesn't seem to send data on the server indeed. Now, where did I leave my tin foil hat?

X+

[Eileen]

2) Some users (eg. wikimedia) don't want to rely on external services

Is this a somewhat similar situation to jquery UI?  I mean we package it as part of Civi - but lots of sites prefer to use the google version because browsers have often already cached it & it reduces hits on their sites.

[Andrew Perry]

We're using flot charts in our Online Membership Management System that talks to Civi - you can see some examples here: http://www.flotcharts.org/flot/examples/

At a glance it seems to have some similarities with nvd3 but I haven't looked at a coding level.  I'll ask one of our team to compare d3/nvd3 with it.

[Eileen]

Andrew - do you know if you had difficulties with printing on flot charts (a google showed it as a possible issue  = which is also the case with google charts )

[xavier]

Hi,

I have been using d3 for the past few months on various projects. Getting into the framework is a bit harder compared to "pre-made" graphs frameworks, but they are now several re-usable charts on the top of d3 that makes it almost as easy.

There is nothing that beats the flexibility and expressiveness of d3 and its geo framework is amazing. I'd suggest we try using it as the go to graph framework if we go custom.

Might be something for me on the sprint to do some graph on d3.

d3 uses svg, I don't think it's a problem to print. Eileen, have you heard about problems with some browsers?

X+

[jamie]

I'd prefer not to depend on an external service - the beauty of CiviCRM is that you can host it yourself, entirely.

From the Google Charts FAQ, it seems that ]you can't download the google code to your server (https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/faq#localdownload), you must include it. That means Google keeps a record of everyone who uses your database. If they are logged into their gmail account, then their access is tied to their gmail identity.

I don't have much experience with either flot or d3, but both seem to have a free license and can be hosted, so I think we should pick the one that best meets our needs. If d3 can solve print problems Eileen identified than it seems like a good candidate.

jamie

[Eileen]

Xavier have you used d3 with CiviReport yet?

[Owen]

+1 on d3

Another possibility is CCC which is an high level abstraction of D3's predecessor Proto Viz. It's part of the Pentaho Ctools dashboard suite but useable standalone http://www.webdetails.pt/ctools/ccc.html

[Eileen]

BTW - if you are interested it is the double pie chart in this pic I'm currently looking at

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviEngage+Enhancements+for+fund-raising

Having done the stacked bar charts in OpenFlashChart I was pretty clear that I didn't want to try to tackle extending it to getting 2 pie charts from one report & trying to handle the hard-coded assumptions. Getting a google report onto the main screen was easy but I haven't tackled getting it onto the dashboard or print screens yet (which was always going to be the hard part).