![React Dashboard]

Introduction

A project for integrating Highcharts into a React app, with proper React components for each Highcharts/Highstock component. Inspired by Recharts, but for Highcharts, obviously.

Why React JSX Highcharts?

Unlike other React Highcharts wrapper libraries, React JSX Highcharts is designed to be dynamic - it is optimised for interactive charts that need to adapt to business logic in your React application.

Other Highcharts wrappers completely destroy and recreate the chart when the configuration options change, which is very wasteful and inefficient.

React JSX Highcharts uses a different approach. By providing React components for each Highcharts component, we can observe exactly which prop has changed and call the optimal Highcharts method behind the scenes. For example, if the data prop were to change on a <Series /> component, React JSX Highcharts can follow Highcharts best practices and use the setData method rather than the more expensive update.

React JSX Highcharts also enables you to write your own Highcharts components, via its powerful higher order components.

Installation

npm install --save react-dashboard

You'll need the peer dependencies too

npm install --save react react-dom prop-types highcharts@^6.0.0

Getting started

The intention of this library is to provide a very thin abstraction of Highcharts using React components. This has been achieved by passing Highcharts configuration options as component props.

In the vast majority of cases, the name of the configuration option, and the name of the component prop are the same.

Example

<Tooltip /> component

<Tooltip padding={10} hideDelay={250} shape="square" split />

This corresponds to the Highcharts' tooltip configuration of

tooltip: {
  enabled: true, // This is assumed when component is mounted
  padding: 10,
  hideDelay: 250,
  shape: 'square',
  split: true
}

We aim to pass all configuration options using the same name, so we use Highcharts' documentation to figure out how to achieve the same with React JSX Highcharts.

Note:

There are two exceptions to the above;

Exception 1

Where Highcharts events are concerned - instead of passing events as an object, we use the React convention onEventName.

Example

<SplineSeries id="my-series" data={myData} onHide={this.handleHide} onShow={this.handleShow} />

This would correspond to the Highcharts configuration

series: [{
  type: 'spline',
  id: 'my-series',
  data: myData,
  events: { hide: this.handleHide, show: this.handleShow }
}]

Exception 2

text configuration options are passed as a React child

Example

<Title>Some Text Here</Title>

This would correspond to the Highcharts configuration

title: {
  text: 'Some Text Here'
}

Example

render () {
  return (
    <HighchartsChart>
      <Chart />

      <Title>Solar Employment Growth by Sector, 2010-2016</Title>

      <Subtitle>Source: thesolarfoundation.com</Subtitle>

      <Legend layout="vertical" align="right" verticalAlign="middle" />

      <XAxis>
        <XAxis.Title>Time</XAxis.Title>
      </XAxis>

      <YAxis>
        <YAxis.Title>Number of employees</YAxis.Title>
        <LineSeries name="Installation" data={[43934, 52503, 57177, 69658, 97031, 119931, 137133, 154175]} />
        <LineSeries name="Manufacturing" data={[24916, 24064, 29742, 29851, 32490, 30282, 38121, 40434]} />
        <LineSeries name="Sales & Distribution" data={[11744, 17722, 16005, 19771, 20185, 24377, 32147, 39387]} />
        <LineSeries name="Project Development" data={[null, null, 7988, 12169, 15112, 22452, 34400, 34227]} />
        <LineSeries name="Other" data={[12908, 5948, 8105, 11248, 8989, 11816, 18274, 18111]} />
      </YAxis>
    </HighchartsChart>
  );
}

// Provide Highcharts object for library to interact with
export default withHighcharts(MyComponent, Highcharts);

Upgrading from 2.x to 3.x

For the vast majority of cases, if your chart works in v2 of React JSX Highcharts it should work in v3 without any required changes.

Ok, so what about the minority of cases?

Dropped React 15 support

v3 is built on top of the new Context API added in React 16.3, using the fantastic create-react-context polyfill for previous React 16 versions.

While polyfills for React 15 exist, I want to minimise the amount of use cases supported, going forward.

Changelog

As of 3.x you are no longer required to use IDs for Axis, Series and PlotLines/Bands

As of 2.1.0 Highcharts 6 is supported

As of 2.x you are required to use the withHighcharts HOC to inject the Highcharts object (see below)

As of 1.2.0 React JSX Highcharts supports using Immutable.js data structures as Series data.

Goals

This project aims to hide the complexity of Highcharts from the React application author, allowing the rendering of charts in a React familiar way.

It also aims to use best React and Highcharts practices where possible - for example if the data prop of a Series were to change React JSX Highcharts uses the Series.prototype.setData method of Highcharts which is much less expensive than update.

Additionally we avoid passing large JSON configuration objects as props, as this leads to painful debugging when trying to work out why your component did or did not re-render. This also helps as an abstraction over the complexity as mentioned above.

Technical approach

Rather than passing around a chart object between all the components, we utilise React's context to share the chart object around, then using Higher Order Components (HOCs), we inject the Highcharts functions we need to the wrapped component.

There are 3 HOCs in this project, provideChart, provideAxis and provideSeries.

In the vast majority of cases, there is no need to use these HOCs directly - but they have been exposed anyway - they are useful if you want to create your own components with this library.

Common issues

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'chart' of undefined

You need to use the withHighcharts higher order component to inject the Highcharts object. See here

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'stockChart' of undefined

As above, or you are importing Highcharts rather than Highstock. Change you Highcharts import to...

import Highcharts from 'highcharts/highstock';

Highcharts error #17

You likely need to add an extra Highcharts module to support the requested series type. This is usually highcharts-more.

import Highcharts from 'react-dashboard';
import addHighchartsMore from 'highcharts/highcharts-more';

addHighchartsMore(Highcharts);

Alternatively it may be the Heatmap, Treemap, Sankey, or one of these extra modules.

import Highcharts from 'react-dashboard';
import addHeatmapModule from 'highcharts/modules/heatmap';
import addTreemapModule from 'highcharts/modules/treemap';

addHeatmapModule(Highcharts);
addTreemapModule(Highcharts);