GoogleVisualr

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GoogleVisualr, is a wrapper around the Google Chart Tools that allows anyone to create beautiful charts with just plain Ruby. You don't have to write any JavaScript at all.

It's good for any Ruby (Rails/Sinatra) setup, and you can handle the entire charting logic in Ruby.

Please refer to the GoogleVisualr API Reference site for a complete list of Google charts that you can create with GoogleVisualr.

tl:dr

  • In your model or controller, write Ruby code to create your chart (e.g. Area Chart, Bar Chart etc).
  • Configure your chart with any of the options as listed in Google's API Docs. E.g. Area Chart.
  • In your view, call chart.to_js(div_id) and that will insert JavaScript into the final HTML output.
  • You get your awesome Google chart, and you didn't write any JavaScript!

Limitations

GoogleVisualr is created solely for the aim of simplifying the display of a chart, and not the interactions.

Hence, do note that GoogleVisualr is not a 100% complete wrapper for Google Chart Tools.

E.g., Methods and Events as described in Google's API Docs - for use after a chart has been rendered, are not implemented because they feel more natural being written as JavaScript functions, within the views or .js files.

Install

Assuming you are on Rails 3, include the gem in your Gemfile.

gem "google_visualr", ">= 2.1"

Basics

This is a basic implementation of the GoogleVisualr::DataTable and GoogleVisualr::AreaChart classes.

For detailed documentation and advanced implementations, please refer to the GoogleVisualr API Reference or read the source.

In your Rails layout, load Google Ajax API in the head tag, at the very top.

<script src='https://www.google.com/jsapi'></script>

In your Rails controller, initialize a GoogleVisualr::DataTable object with an empty constructor.

data_table = GoogleVisualr::DataTable.new

Populate data_table with column headers, and row values.

# Add Column Headers
data_table.new_column('string', 'Year' )
data_table.new_column('number', 'Sales')
data_table.new_column('number', 'Expenses')

# Add Rows and Values
data_table.add_rows([
    ['2004', 1000, 400],
    ['2005', 1170, 460],
    ['2006', 660, 1120],
    ['2007', 1030, 540]
])

Create a GoogleVisualr::AreaChart with data_table and configuration options.

option = { width: 400, height: 240, title: 'Company Performance' }
@chart = GoogleVisualr::Interactive::AreaChart.new(data_table, option)

In your Rails view, render the Google chart.

<div id='chart'></div>
<%= render_chart(@chart, 'chart') %>

Listeners

For an example usage of listeners, please refer to this comment.

Besides listeners you can now also redraw charts in your JavaScript maunally by calling draw_<element id>() function. See this commit for more details.

Support

Please submit all feedback, bugs and feature-requests to GitHub Issues Tracker.

Feel free to fork the project, make improvements or bug fixes and submit pull requests (with tests!).

Who's Using GoogleVisualr?

I would like to collect some data about who's using this Gem. Please drop me a line.

Change Log

Version 2.3.0

  • Issue 69 Support generating chart Javascript without