Integration with any charting library

This tutorial will help you connect a 3rd party visualization tool to Flexmonster Pivot Table and Charts. 

You can integrate with any charting library using the getData() API call. getData() is used to pass data from Flexmonster to a charting library.

In this tutorial, we will integrate Flexmonster with the d3.js charting library. Integration with another library will have similar steps. To see examples of integrating with other charting libraries, including ApexCharts, ECharts, and Charts.js, visit our Examples page.

Adding the basis for integration with charts

Step 1. Add the component with data to your HTML page. Replace XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX with your license key. If you don't have a license key, contact our team and request a special trial key.

<div id="pivotContainer">The component will appear here</div>
<script src="https://cdn.flexmonster.com/flexmonster.js"></script>

<script>
  const pivot = new Flexmonster({ 
    container: "pivotContainer",
    componentFolder: "https://cdn.flexmonster.com/",
    toolbar: true,
    report: {
      dataSource: {
        filename: "data/data.csv"
      },
      slice: {
        rows: [
          { uniqueName: "Country" }
        ],
        columns: [
          { uniqueName: "Business Type" },
          { uniqueName: "[Measures]" } 
        ],
        measures: [
          { uniqueName: "Price" }
        ]
      }
    },
    licenseKey: "XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX"
  });
</script>

Step 2. Add a container for the chart:

<svg id="d3Chart" width="650" height="230"></svg> 

Step 3. Add a reportcomplete event handler to know when the pivot table is ready to provide data:

reportcomplete: function() {
  pivot.off("reportcomplete");
  createChart();
}

Step 4. Add a function to create the chart. This function uses getData(options, callbackHandler, updateHandler).

function createChart() {
  pivot.getData(
    {
      // define your slice 
    },
    drawChart,
    updateChart
  ); 
} 

Live example

Preparing the data and drawing the chart

The most important part of drawing a chart is preparing the data by transforming it from the format returned by the getData() API call to the format that suits the 3rd party visualization tool:

let data = prepareDataFunction(rawData);

This example shows how to define and use a function (in our example it is prepareDataFunction) to process the data. This function should prepare data appropriately for the charting library format. In this example prepareDataFunction iterates through the data array from rawData and discards a record containing the grand total because it is unnecessary for the bar chart. The function also renames rows from r0 to member and values from v0 to value. This is not required, but it makes the code more readable when referring to the data later. We have the following pivot table:

The data array from rawData looks like this:

data:[
  {
    v0: 6221870
  },
  {
    r0: "Australia",
    v0: 1372281
  },
  {
    r0: "France",
    v0: 1117794
  },
  {
    r0: "Germany",
    v0: 1070453
  },
  {
    r0: "Canada",
    v0: 1034112
  },
  {
    r0: "United States",
    v0: 847331
  },
  {
    r0: "United Kingdom",
    v0: 779899
  }
]

After prepareDataFunction, the data will look like this:

[
  {
    member: "Australia",
    value: 1372281
  },
  {
    member: "France",
    value: 1117794
  },
  {
    member: "Germany",
    value: 1070453
  },
  {
    member: "Canada",
    value: 1034112
  },
  {
    member: "United States",
    value: 847331
  },
  {
    member: "United Kingdom",
    value: 779899
  }
]

The drawChart function draws a chart using the processed data. In our JSFiddle example, the logic of drawing is the same as in the d3.js example. The updateChart function works similarly but clears the SVG first.