Data Visualisation

I’ve made a start on adding some data visualisation facilities to Pyrrho. These will come built in to REST, and take advantage of the HTML5 canvas facilites. The REST service has been improving steadily, and now accepts posted text/csv data. But the Data Visualisation ideas are not quite such an obvious step.

There are lots of charting and data visualisation libraries, but adding a package such as Visiblox to Pyrrho would more than double its size (the Visiblox DLL is 797KB, while Pyrrho is 700KB). So for now I plan to code the extensions myself.

I have added a set of metadata flags for Tables and Columns that activate the charting code. As usual these are role specific so it is easy to imagine a data visualisation role, with multiple charts for tables. By design column metadata can also be added to views. The flags can be added using ALTER syntax, e.g.
alter table monthlysales series ‘Sales analysis by month’
alter table monthlysales alter mth X ‘Month’
alter table monthlysales alter total line ‘Total Sales $M’
alter table monthlysales alter recurring line ‘Repeat Orders $M’

The following flags have been added so far:

Output flag	Context	Effect
Pie	Table/View	Pie chart
Series	Table/View	Data Series
Points	Table/View	Scatter chart
Caption	Column	Column contains strings to annotate chart points
X	Column	Common column for series or X for X-Y plot. The plan here is that X could be a string, an int, or a real
Y	Column	Y column for points chart. Data should be int or real
Histogram	Column	For bar series chart: description string is for legend
Line	Column	For line series chart: description string is for legend

Unfortunately at present the Windows control used by the RESTClient does not support the HTML5 Canvas, so the results need to be displayed in an ordinary browser. I have made a start on implementation, as the graphic here shows. The axis ranges are selected automatically. So far the new facilities have required less than 20KB in the server, and less than 100 lines of script need to be downloaded to the client. A few more lines will be needed for the titles, multiple series and pie charts, and I hope to add these soon.