I’ve been tinkering with D3js on and off for a couple of months now, purely for generating simple, inline charts in web pages, made from data already dumped into HTML tables. Doing this is easier than building, caching and referencing external bitmap (PNG, GIF or whatever) images with Gnuplot or GD::Graph and also simpler than building bitmap images and serving them base64 encoded inline with <img alt=”” src=”data:…” />.
Using jQuery (or similar) to extract data from an already-present HTML table means there’s almost no code required whenever you want to add and plot a new column that someone might want to report on. Pushing all the work to the client should also mean slightly lighter server loads, though granted it’s already done the heavy lifting during the query to generate the table.
I’ve used examples from a number of sources, mostly from over on the d3js.org website itself and Mike Bostock’s inspiring example gallery. Plus the ever useful jQuery and jQueryUI libraries.
The result is a tabbed (with a jqueryui-themed unordered list) report based on a data table below. Clicking on either a tab or a table heading (all except the date) will animate and redraw the chart above. The data are collected using a jQuery selector on column classes in each.
Feel free to take and reuse it – just pinch the frame source.