EC standalone plug-in - various improvements / feature requests

[alexboss]

Hi @daemth , I'm Alexandre, and we'll meet on October 10th, nice to meet you ;-) .

First of all, I'd like to congratulate you for this great project which really makes the configuration and integration of charts an easy process.

I'd like to share with you and the community a list of improvements that could be added to EC. Most of them will serve some of our specific needs, but they might also interest other people. Here there are.

Generic businesses

Support of live / on-the-fly data (CSV)

At the moment, EC provides the tab "url CSV" to reference a CSV file, but as soon as the form is submitted, the CSV file is imported. So live data is then turned into static data, embed in the HC JSON object.

Possible improvement: link to the URL of the CSV file containing data, and grab the data on-the-fly, at the time the chart is rendered.

It might not have to be tackled at EC level, but some mechanisms will have to make such behavior efficient (caching, etc.).

Support of live / on-the-fly data (JSON)

Similar to previous case, except it would support data configured in a JSON file.

Possible improvement: link to the URL of the JSON file containing data, and grab the data on-the-fly, at the time the chart is rendered.

Support of JSON import / copy-paste / URL

When EC is used together with DP, the HC JSON object is saved and can be retrieved / edited at later time.

With the EC standalone plug-in, such feature is missing so webmasters have no mean to edit an existing chart at a later time.

Possible improvement: allow the import / copy-paste / link to URL of HC JSON object to resume or allow editing of existing charts.

Similar request: #14

Load / Save

This is similar to previous case, except it would allow to save / load charts directly from the EC standalone plug-in.

Sounds like something in progress: #22

Support of themes

There is no option to load additional themes provided by HC (https://github.com/highcharts/highcharts/tree/master/js/themes) - Examples:

• Dark Unica http://www.highcharts.com/demo/dark-unica
• Sand Signika http://www.highcharts.com/demo/sand-signika
• Grid Light http://www.highcharts.com/demo/grid-light

Possible improvement: add a tab or an option to select a different theme.

Pluggable EC

The ReadMe file hosted on EC Github https://github.com/daemth/easychart provides well document API and ways to configure the EC object.

Anyway, there's no information on how to plug or hook elements to the EC GUI or engine.

Possible improvement: provide technical documentation on how to create plug-ins / enrich features of EC.

Specific businesses

These businesses are not all directly related to EC, as EC is a GUI for HC and is limited to HC possibilities.

However, they are mentioned to give a large vision on how charts can be used within organizations.

Support of JSON-stat

Possible improvement: reference a JSON-stat URL as a source of data (more information about JSON-stat format https://json-stat.org/ ).

But for this, JSON-stat should be supported by HC first.

Wrapping of HC JSON object into an abstract object

EC allows to create a HC JSON object to represent a chart.

In our project, the HC JSON object must then be wrapped into a abstract object so that it can be detected and rendered by our custom lazy loader.

Possible improvement: provide a way to wrap the HC JSON object or map properties into an abstract object.