Display West Africa with Google GeoChart

Question

I'd like to display a worldmap (GeoChart) using Google's Chart API where some countries are listed by country and others are displayed based on a grouping/region.

My data might look like this:

[["Country","DataValue"],["United States",2000],["West Africa",3000],["Great Britain",1500]];

Is this possible to do? I tried playing with the displayMode property of the options but that didn't do any good. I also tried using "011" instead of "West Africa" since "011" is recognized as a region by the API. That did not work either.

I was able to display just the region of West Africa with the region option but that isn't what I'm after. I really want to display the world but have regions like West Africa handled and colored as a group rather than individual countries.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Google Geochart supports either the whole world or specific region (e.g. 011 Western Africa)

Since your goal:

to display the world but have regions like West Africa handled and colored as a group rather than individual countries

i would propose the following solution: to dynamically expand data table row for a region into the rows per every country from that region:

function expandRegions(dataTable) {
    var regions = {
        'West Africa': {
            '204': 'Benin',
            '854': 'Burkina Faso',
            '132': 'Cabo Verde',
            '384': "Cote d'Ivoire",
            '270': 'Gambia',
            '288': 'Ghana',
            '324': 'Guinea',
            '624': 'Guinea-Bissau',
            '430': 'Liberia',
            '466': 'Mali',
            '478': 'Mauritania',
            '562': 'Niger',
            '566': 'Nigeria',
            '654': 'Saint Helena',
            '686': 'Senegal',
            '694': 'Sierra Leone',
            '768': 'Togo'
        }
    };


    for (var i = 0; i < dataTable.getNumberOfRows(); i++) {
        var regionName = dataTable.getValue(i, 0);
        var region = regions[regionName];
        if (region) {
            var value = dataTable.getValue(i, 1);
            dataTable.removeRow(i); //remove region row
            //add countries from region rows 
            for (var code in region) {
                var countryName = region[code];
                dataTable.addRow([countryName, value]);
            }
        }
    }
    return dataTable;
}

Complete example

google.load("visualization", "1", { packages: ["geochart"] });
google.setOnLoadCallback(drawRegionsMap);

function drawRegionsMap() {

    var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable([
        ["Country","DataValue"],
        ["United States",2000],
        ["West Africa",3000],
        ["Great Britain",1500]
     ]);
    
    data = expandRegions(data);

    var options = {
    };
    var chart = new google.visualization.GeoChart(document.getElementById('regions_div'));
    chart.draw(data, options);
}


function expandRegions(dataTable) {
    var regions = {
        'West Africa': {
            '204': 'Benin',
            '854': 'Burkina Faso',
            '132': 'Cabo Verde',
            '384': "Cote d'Ivoire",
            '270': 'Gambia',
            '288': 'Ghana',
            '324': 'Guinea',
            '624': 'Guinea-Bissau',
            '430': 'Liberia',
            '466': 'Mali',
            '478': 'Mauritania',
            '562': 'Niger',
            '566': 'Nigeria',
            '654': 'Saint Helena',
            '686': 'Senegal',
            '694': 'Sierra Leone',
            '768': 'Togo'
        }
    };


    for (var i = 0; i < dataTable.getNumberOfRows(); i++) {
        var regionName = dataTable.getValue(i, 0);
        var region = regions[regionName];
        if (region) {
            var value = dataTable.getValue(i, 1);
            dataTable.removeRow(i);
            for (var code in region) {
                var countryName = region[code];
                dataTable.addRow([countryName, value]);
            }
        }
    }
    return dataTable;
}

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<div id="regions_div" style="width: 900px; height: 500px;"></div>