flot

About

flot is a JavaScript plotting library for engineering and scientific applications derived from Flot: http://www.flotcharts.org/

Take a look at the the examples in examples/index.html; they should give a good impression of what flot can do, and the source code of the examples is probably the fastest way to learn how to use flot.

Installation

Just include the JavaScript file after you’ve included jQuery.

Generally, all modern browsers are supported.

You need at least jQuery 1.2.6, but try at least 1.3.2 for interactive charts because of performance improvements in event handling.

Basic usage

Create a placeholder div to put the graph in:

<div id="placeholder"></div>

You need to set the width and height of this div, otherwise the plot library doesn’t know how to scale the graph. You can do it inline like this:

<div id="placeholder" style="width:600px;height:300px"></div>

You can also do it with an external stylesheet. Make sure that the placeholder isn’t within something with a display:none CSS property - in that case, Flot has trouble measuring label dimensions which results in garbled looks and might have trouble measuring the placeholder dimensions which is fatal (it’ll throw an exception).

Then when the div is ready in the DOM, which is usually on document ready, run the plot function:

$.plot($("#placeholder"), data, options);

Here, data is an array of data series and options is an object with settings if you want to customize the plot. Take a look at the examples for some ideas of what to put in or look at the API reference. Here’s a quick example that’ll draw a line from (0, 0) to (1, 1):

$.plot($("#placeholder"), [ [[0, 0], [1, 1]] ], { yaxis: { max: 1 } });

The plot function immediately draws the chart and then returns a plot object with a couple of methods.

Documentation and examples

API Documentation is available here: API reference

About how the plugins work: Plugins

High level overview on how interactions are handled internally: Interactions

Examples are included in the examples folder of this repository, but they can be tried out online as well: Examples

CircleCI

CircleCI is used in this repo to run dont-break, which checks if the current version of flot breaks unit tests on specified dependent projects.