Charticulator

Charticulator is a new charting tool that allows you to design charts by interactively specifying constraints.

Deployed beta branch available on https://zbritva.github.io/charticulator/

Project Team & contributors

• Donghao Ren
• Bongshin Lee
• Matthew Brehmer
• Nathan Evans
• Kate Lytvynets
• David Tittsworth
• Chris Trevino
• Ilfat Galiev
• Dan Marshall
• Ramil Minyukov
• Daniel Marsh-Patrick
• doubleamp
• deldersveld
• duncanhealy

Build

Follow the following steps to prepare a development environment:

• Install nodejs 8.0+: https://nodejs.org/
• Install yarnjs 1.7+: https://yarnpkg.com/

Install node modules:

npm install

Copy the template configuration file and edit its contents:

cp config.template.yml config.yml
# (on windows, use copy instead of cp)

Run the following command to build Charticulator, which will create a self contained bundle in the dist folder:

npm run build

App configurations (config.yml)

Charticulator stores user charts in IndexedDB by default. The backend can be switched to hybrid, cdn.

Where

• cdn sets loading charts from external resource. specified in *.json file specified in CDNBackend section.

• hybrid sets loading charts from IndexedDB and CDN, but saves charts in IndexedDB only.

Backend: "cdn"

resourcesDescriptionUrl sets URL to *.json file with chart list.

CDNBackend:
  resourcesDescriptionUrl: https://ilfat-galiev.im/charts.json

Example of chart list for loading from CDN:

[
  {
    "id": "oecd_population_2018_1725220272068",
    "url": "https://ilfat-galiev.im/charts/bubble_chart.chart",
    "type": "chart",
    "source": "cdn",
    "metadata": {
      "name": "Population of OECD Countries in 2018",
      "thumbnail": "https://ilfat-galiev.im/images/gallery/oecd_population_2018.png",
      "timeCreated": 1724554194242,
      "timeModified": 1724556972145,
      "allowDelete": false
    },
    "author": {
      "name": "Microsoft"
    }
  },
  {
    "id": "arc_diagram_1636761600",
    "url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PowerBI-tips/Charticulator-Templates/main/templates/Arc%20Diagram/arc_diagram.tmplt",
    "type": "tmplt",
    "source": "cdn",
    "metadata": {
      "name": "Arc diagram",
      "thumbnail": "",
      "timeCreated": 1636027200,
      "timeModified": 1636027200,
      "allowDelete": false
    },
    "author": {
      "name": "Mike Carlo",
      "contact": "http://powerbi.tips/"
    }
  }
]

Embedding App to website

To embedding the app into web site include JS files and CSS files (files are located in dist folder after build) to your HTML:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles/app.css" type="text/css" />
<script src="data/config.js"></script>
<script src="scripts/app.bundle.js"></script>

Add "container" element for root:

<div id="container"></div>

Add JS code for initialize application

<script type="text/javascript">
  var application = new Charticulator.Application();
  application
    .initialize(
      CHARTICULATOR_CONFIG,
      "container", // container ID
      {}
    )
    .then(() => {
      // sets callback function that calls on saving a chart
      application.setOnSaveChartCallback((chart) => {
        console.log("chart has been saved");
      });
      // sets callback function that calls on exporting a template
      // if callback returns true, the app doesn't open file saving dialog
      application.setOnExportTemplateCallback((template) => {
        console.log("template has been exported");
        return false;
      });

      // loads dataset into app
      // application.loadData(data);

      // loads chart template into app, if template columns and dataset columns aren't match app opens columns mapping view
      // application.loadTemplate(data);
    });
</script>

Testing

Run a local web server to test Charticulator:

# Serve Charticulator at http://localhost:4000
npm run server

# Serve Charticulator publicly at http://0.0.0.0:4000
# Use this if you want to enable access from another computer
npm run public_server

Development

For a live development environment, keep the following command running:

npm run start

This command watches for any change in src/ and sass/, and recompiles Charticulator automatically. Once this up, open http://localhost:4000/ to launch Charticulator. Now when you change the source code, the app can be updated by simply refreshing the browser page (you may need to disable browser cache).

In development mode, there is a test application for UI components, which can be accessed at http://localhost:4000/test.html.

The watch mode won't update when you change the following:

• config.yml
• THIRD_PARTY.yml
• webpack.config.js

When you update these, please do yarn build again.

Sample Datasets

You can add custom sample datasets that can be used with Charticulator. To do so, create a datasets folder at the root of the repository(if it doesn't exist), add your .csv (or .tsv) to that folder, and finally create a files.json file in the folder with the following contents:

[
    {
        "name": "<Your dataset display name>",
        "description": "<Your dataset desription>",
        "tables": [
            {
                "name": "<Your dataset file name without extension>",
                "type": "<csv || tsv>",
                "url": "<Your dataset file name with extension>"
            }
        ]
    }
]

Testing

Charticulator currently include a rudimentary test code:

yarn test

More test cases are needed.

Documentation

Run yarn typedoc to generate documentation pages. The page will be awailable in ./docs/charticulator

Start point of documentation is index page {@link "index"}