#chartkick

Article ~ Practical Graphs on Rails: Chartkick in Practice

In a previous article , We covered the basics of Chartkick – a great library to easily render graphs in Rails apps. The article gained some attention so we decided to cover a bit more and show how Chartkick, along with Groupdate, can be used to solve a real-world task. Just to remind you, Chartkick is a gem that integrates with Rails and provides methods to quickly render graphs based on your…

Open Source - Chartkick

If you follow some of my posts about Open Source things, you have probably noticed that I love open source libraries that are charts. This is the third one I have played with and implemented in some random data. 

This has to be the easiest one that I have came across that allows for direct ruby references to the database. There are also Python and pure javascript version of this. There is no converting into array or having to jump through hoops. It is pretty awesome.

Today I continued to work on my capstone project. The main focus of the day was adding Unobtrusive JavaScript wherever I found it appropriate. The most notable difference is that now, in my main brew note show page, you can add rows to the various tables, edit rows in place, and even delete rows, all without requiring a page refresh.

I also started on my note compare page, where you can directly compare brew notes for two brews. The hope here is to be able to fine tune your process by figuring out exactly what changed between your brew days and how it affected the final product. For now, you can see a list of all the notes for a single recipe, and open up notes on a left or right column. I am using Chartkick to help visualize the data in a more exciting way.

We all love nice looking colourful charts ( 3d) on our web and mobile platforms. But most of these make the page load slower.

3d Visualizations of Pie Charts, Graph Charts, Bar Charts. Column Diagrams from web databases are generally rendered over standard JS using jQuery which sometimes can cause timeouts or may not be rendered properly if the page doesn't load fast.

Chartkick aims to solve that problem by simplifying your admin dashboard and giving each chart its own endpoint.

With Chartkick you can create beautiful Javascript charts using one line of Ruby.

Example of a Column Chart

<%= column_chart Task.group_by_day_of_week(:created_at).count %>

  Example of  a Pie Chart

<%= pie_chart Goal.group("name").count %>

  So how do you install it ?

Start by downloading Chartkick here

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "chartkick"

And add the javascript files to your views. chartkick.js runs as a Rails engine - no need to install it.

Note: These files must be included before the helper methods.

For Google Charts, use:

<%= javascript_include_tag "//www.google.com/jsapi", "chartkick" %>

If you prefer Highcharts, use:

<%= javascript_include_tag "path/to/highcharts.js", "chartkick" %>