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Introduction to {echarts4r}

This repository is complementary to the talk given to the Edmonton R Users Group on 2022-04-28.

Resources

• {echarts4r} website
• {echarts4r} GitHub repository
• Apache ECharts website

Apache ECharts

Apache ECharts is an open source JavaScript data visualization library, with a bunch of built in types of visuals to choose from.

The cheat sheet can be a great landing place to dig into the specific theming elements for your chart that you have access to manipulate via the hundreds of formatting arguments offered.

You can even edit a chart on the fly in the browser to watch the chart change as you manipulate the JavaScript code directly.

The {echarts4r} R package

• Developed and maintained by John Coene
• First stable release hit CRAN in 2018 (v0.0.2)
• Most recent version is v0.4.3

The Case for {echarts4r}

• Interactivity that you can’t get from {ggplot2}
• Syntax that is as simple as {dplyr}
• Aesthetics that are cleaner and smoother than plotly (e.g., no big toolbar above the chart with widgets that no one ever uses…)

Standout Capabilities

Some of my other favorite things about {echarts4r} include:

• sliders for “zooming” the x- and/or y-axis
• capturing client-side events, allowing you to:
  • capture mouseover, click, or brush (selection) events
    • Example
  • connect two charts, so that you can filter one chart by interacting with another chart (similar experience to {crosstalk})
    • Example

Reproducibility

If you would like to reproduce these charts yourself, we recommend taking advantage of the {renv} package to ensure the package versions you are using are consistent with this repository / talk. You can do so by following these steps:

1. Clone this repository to your local machine

2. Open the echarts4r-intro.Rproj file from the directory on your local machine where you cloned this repository. This should install the {renv} package if you do not already have it installed, but if you don’t see that happen in the console, run install.packages("renv").

3. Run renv::restore() to install the dependencies needed to run this app successfully

4. Run the scripts in the examples directory

Session Info

utils::sessionInfo()
#> R version 4.1.1 (2021-08-10)
#> Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
#> Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)
#> 
#> Matrix products: default
#> 
#> locale:
#> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 
#> [2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252   
#> [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
#> [4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
#> [5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252    
#> 
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices datasets  utils     methods   base     
#> 
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#>  [1] compiler_4.1.1  magrittr_2.0.3  fastmap_1.1.0   cli_3.3.0      
#>  [5] htmltools_0.5.2 tools_4.1.1     rstudioapi_0.13 yaml_2.3.5     
#>  [9] stringi_1.7.6   rmarkdown_2.14  knitr_1.38      stringr_1.4.0  
#> [13] xfun_0.30       digest_0.6.29   rlang_1.0.2     renv_0.15.2    
#> [17] evaluate_0.15