CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rshinyplotly
tmarusca
tmarusca

Reputation: 45

Plotly in R ignores custom tick marks for strings that seem like dates?

I am trying to plot a heatmap with plotly in R, and for event listener purposes (click, lasso) I need to keep the data in its original form, but I would like to change the ticks' names on the x axis.

If the ticks resemble a date (even though they're stored as a string), plotly ignores my manual tick names - plot1. In any other case, this works as expected - plot2.

Is this a bug or a feature in plotly? Or, how can I force plotly to not treat the column x as date, but as a string, and to enable manual tick names?

plot1 plot2

library("data.table")
library("plotly")
set.seed(564351654)

dt <- CJ(x= c("2018-01-01","2019-01-01","2020-01-01"),
            y= c("A","B"))

dt[,x2:=paste0("blabla",x)]
dt[,z:=runif(nrow(dt))]

#plot1 ignores my manual ticks
xticks <- dt[,unique(x)]
xvals <- paste0("year",substr(xticks,3,4))
# [1] "year18" "year19" "year20"
plot_ly(dt,
          x=~x,
          y=~y,
          z=~z,
          type="heatmap") %>%
    layout(
        title = "plot1",
        xaxis = list(
            autotick = F,
            tickmode = "array",
            ticktext = xvals,
            tickvals = xticks
        )
    )

#plot2 is all good.
xticks <- dt[,unique(x2)]
xvals <- paste0("year",substr(xticks,9,10))
# [1] "year18" "year19" "year20"
plot_ly(dt,
          x=~x2,
          y=~y,
          z=~z,
          type="heatmap") %>%
    layout(
        title = "plot2",
        xaxis = list(
            autotick = F,
            tickmode = "array",
            ticktext = xvals,
            tickvals = xticks
        )
    )

Upvotes: 0

Views: 377

Answers (1)

mnist
mnist

Reputation: 6956

You can set type to category:

#plot1 ignores my manual ticks
xticks <- dt[,unique(x)]
xvals <- paste0("year",substr(xticks,3,4))
# [1] "year18" "year19" "year20"
plot_ly(dt,
        x=~x,
        y=~y,
        z=~z,
        type="heatmap") %>%
  layout(
    title = "plot1",
    xaxis = list(
      autotick = F,
      tickmode = "array",
      ticktext = xvals,
      tickvals = xticks,
      type = "category"
    )
  )

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions