Supercharge Your Vue.js Apps with Stunning Data Visualizations
Data is the lifeblood of modern web applications. From social media analytics to financial reports, the ability to collect, analyze and visualize vast amounts of information is increasingly vital to an organization‘s success.
As users, we‘ve grown to expect data to be presented in clear, compelling formats that instantly communicate insights and help drive our decision making. Long gone are the days of deciphering row after row in a spreadsheet. In the age of Big Data, interactive charts and graphs reign supreme.
Consider these eye-opening statistics:
- Businesses using visual data discovery tools are 28% more likely to find timely information than those who rely solely on managed reporting and dashboards. (Source)
- Managers in organizations with visual data recovery tools can make decisions 10% faster than those without. (Source)
- High-performing companies are 5 times more likely to use visual data discovery than low performers. (Source)
As a Vue developer, providing your users with rich data visualizations is no longer a nice-to-have – it‘s table stakes. Luckily, the incredible ECharts library and vue-echarts wrapper make it dead simple to start adding professional-grade charts to your Vue applications today.
Why ECharts?
Before we dive into implementation, you may be wondering what makes ECharts so special. After all, it‘s just one fish in the sea of JavaScript charting libraries. Why should you choose it over other popular options like Chart.js, D3, or Highcharts?
First and foremost, ECharts is downright massive in both scope and capability. It boasts over 20 unique chart types ranging from basic line and bar graphs to more esoteric offerings like candlestick, sunburst and sankey diagrams. No matter how diverse your data, ECharts has a visualization for you.
What‘s more, each of these chart types are insanely customizable. You have full control over every visual aspect from colors and fonts to tooltips and animations. This flexibility allows you to perfectly tailor your charts to match your application‘s unique design language.
But ECharts isn‘t just eye candy. Under the hood, it‘s an incredibly powerful and optimized data manipulation engine capable of gracefully handling enormous datasets. Through techniques like streaming rendering and incremental update, ECharts can effortlessly visualize datasets in the hundreds of megabytes without breaking a sweat.
And the cherry on top? ECharts has a thriving community and exceptional documentation. With detailed demos and real-world examples for every conceivable use case, you‘ll never be left high and dry trying to puzzle out how to translate your data into a chart.
Still not convinced? Take a peek at this recent developer survey of over 10,000 JavaScript developers:
| Charting Library | Percentage Used |
|---|---|
| Chart.js | 41.7% |
| ECharts.js | 26.8% |
| D3.js | 14.9% |
| Highcharts | 10.2% |
Source: State of JavaScript 2020
As you can see, ECharts enjoys widespread popularity among the JavaScript community, trailing only the venerable Chart.js. By adopting ECharts, you‘re not only getting a best-in-class charting tool, but joining an active ecosystem dedicated to advancing the art of browser-based data visualization.
Getting Started with vue-echarts
Enough with the high-level overviews – let‘s get our hands dirty integrating ECharts into an actual Vue application!
Installation
First, we need to install ECharts and the vue-echarts wrapper. Fire up your terminal in your Vue project directory and run:
npm install echarts vue-echartsThis will pull in the latest versions of both libraries from npm.
Importing and Registering Components
With our dependencies installed, we need to import the charts and components we‘ll be using in our Vue application. In your main.js or similar entry file, add:
import Vue from ‘vue‘;
import ECharts from ‘vue-echarts‘;
import { use } from ‘echarts/core‘;
// import ECharts modules manually to reduce bundle size
import {
CanvasRenderer
} from ‘echarts/renderers‘;
import {
BarChart,
LineChart,
PieChart,
ScatterChart
} from ‘echarts/charts‘;
import {
GridComponent,
TooltipComponent,
LegendComponent,
TitleComponent
} from ‘echarts/components‘;
use([
CanvasRenderer,
BarChart,
LineChart,
PieChart,
ScatterChart,
GridComponent,
TooltipComponent,
LegendComponent,
TitleComponent
]);
// register globally (or you can do it locally)
Vue.component(‘v-chart‘, ECharts);
new Vue({
//...
}).$mount(‘#app‘);There‘s a good bit going on here so let‘s break it down. First, we import vue-echarts and register it as a global component. This allows us to use the <v-chart> tag anywhere in our templates.
However, to keep our production bundle lean, we don‘t import the entirety of ECharts. Instead, we use the use function to cherry-pick just the specific chart types (e.g. BarChart, LineChart) and components (e.g. TooltipComponent, LegendComponent) our application needs.
With this setup, we‘re now ready to start developing some charts!
Creating a Basic Line Chart
Let‘s say we want to display a company‘s stock price over time as a line chart. Here‘s how we might define it in a Vue component:
<template>
<v-chart :options="chartOptions" />
</template>
<script>
export default {
data() {
return {
chartOptions: {
xAxis: {
data: [‘Jan‘, ‘Feb‘, ‘Mar‘, ‘Apr‘, ‘May‘, ‘Jun‘]
},
yAxis: {},
series: [{
type: ‘line‘,
data: [7, 6, 9, 12, 8, 10]
}]
}
}
}
}
</script>The <v-chart> component is the star of the show here. We bind its options prop to a chartOptions data property which will contain the actual ECharts config.
In chartOptions, we specify the data for the x-axis (the months), define an empty y-axis, and create a series with the type ‘line‘ and the corresponding price values. ECharts takes care of the rest, drawing a handsome interactive line chart.
Not too shabby for a few lines of config! This declarative options structure is consistent across all chart types, making ECharts incredibly easy to pick up.
Customizing Charts
The real power of ECharts lies in its customization. You can fine-tune virtually every aspect of your chart‘s appearance and behavior through the options object.
Want to adjust the colors? Add a color array:
chartOptions: {
color: [‘#c23531‘,‘#2f4554‘, ‘#61a0a8‘, ‘#d48265‘, ‘#91c7ae‘],
// ...
}Need a title and legend? Simply include them in your options:
chartOptions: {
title: {
text: ‘Stock Price Over Time‘
},
legend: {
data: [‘Price‘]
},
// ...
}How about some tooltips when you hover?
chartOptions: {
// ...
tooltip: {
trigger: ‘axis‘
},
}The options are truly endless. I encourage you to refer to the exhaustive ECharts documentation to explore the vast configurability at your fingertips.
Responsive Resizing
One common requirement of any modern chart is to be responsive, effortlessly adapting to different screen and container sizes. While this can often be fiddly to implement, ECharts and vue-echarts handle it with aplomb.
First, set the width and height of your chart to be a percentage:
<template>
<v-chart
:options="chartOptions"
autoresize
width="100%"
height="400px"
/>
</template>The autoresize prop tells vue-echarts to automatically resize the chart whenever its container changes. Then it‘s just a matter of setting your chart‘s width to 100% to fill its parent and giving it a fixed pixel height.
Now whenever the page dimensions change, your chart will dutifully update its size to match – no media queries required!
Animating Chart Transitions
Let‘s face it – animation just makes everything better. It‘s especially effective in charts to help users track changes in data over time. ECharts has robust support for animating charts between different states.
To see it in action, let‘s simulate real-time data updates to our trusty line chart:
export default {
data() { /* ... */ },
mounted() {
setInterval(() => {
// randomly walk the price
const newPrice = this.chartOptions.series[0].data.slice(-1)[0] + Math.random() * 4 - 2;
// shift off first data point and append new one
this.chartOptions.series[0].data.shift();
this.chartOptions.series[0].data.push(newPrice);
}, 2000);
}
}Here in the mounted hook, we start an interval that, every two seconds, slightly alters the last price point and adds it to the data array.
With animation configured in ECharts, we get a captivating real-time chart of changing stock prices! The motion provides a natural cue to the user that the data is dynamic and evolving.
There are numerous knobs and dials available to tweak animation behavior. Definitely check out the animation docs for inspiration.
Optimizing Performance
ECharts is blazingly fast by default, capable of smoothly animating hundreds of thousands of data points. However, as your datasets grow larger and your charts more complex, there are a number of steps you can take to keep your application snappy.
First and foremost, only import the components your application actually uses. In our setup, we used the use function to include specific parts of the ECharts package. The more specific you can be here, the smaller your bundled code will be.
By the same token, try to limit the number of series and data points you add to a single chart. Not only does this bloat the size of your options object, but the DOM and SVG elements ECharts must create and manage on each render. When dealing with very large datasets, consider using DataZoom to load data in chunks.
Another common pressure point is updating a chart‘s data on every change. In our stock price example above, we updated the chart every two seconds on a fixed interval. But if prices were changing multiple times per second, these rapid-fire updates could quickly overwhelm the browser.
To combat this, consider implementing a debounce or throttle of the update function. This will coalesce the stream of changes into more manageable, batched updates. Your users will thank you for the increased responsiveness!
Conclusion
We‘ve covered a lot of ground in our exploration of vue-echarts. At this point, I hope you have a newfound appreciation for just how powerful and flexible this combo is for building stunning data visualizations in Vue.
But with great power comes great responsibility. When wielding a tool as mighty as ECharts, it‘s crucial to keep the end user at the forefront of your mind. Charts overflowing with too much data or crammed with every possible bell and whistle are more likely to overwhelm than enlighten.
Strive to keep your charts clean, focused, and purposeful. Every design decision – from the chart type to the color palette – should be made in service of communicating the data and message at hand. Eschew chart junk and superfluous decoration. Label axes clearly and provide informative tooltips to aid understanding.
Above all, remember that charts are merely a means to an end. They are conduits for information, not the information itself. A beautiful chart is worse than useless if it fails to convey meaning and insight.
So by all means, leverage ECharts to the fullest to create vibrant, interactive data visualizations. But never lose sight of the reason behind the razzle-dazzle: to enlighten, to clarify, to empower your users to make smarter decisions.
Now go forth and make your Vue apps a little more chartastic!