This is a customizable React component library for scatterplots. Unlike many other charting libraries out there, the <Scatterplot/>
component can handle tens of thousands of datapoints without any problems or significant lag. This is made possible by using WebGL (React Three Fiber) under the hood instead of canvas
or SVG
elements (like virtually all popular charting libraries do).
If you happen to know of any (free!) charting library that can handle large datasets (and includes scatterplots) please let me know! I implemented this only because even after a lot of searching I couldn't find anything online.
Note: throughout this README I assume that you use yarn
as your package manager. If you use npm
or pnpm
just look up the equivalent commands online.
- run
yarn add @sejmou/react-big-dataset-scatterplot
- import the CSS styles required for the component to render properly in the entrypoint of your app (usually
main.tsx
) by adding the lineimport 'react-big-dataset-scatterplot/dist/styles.css';
I have put together an example React (Vite) app that uses this library with a considerably large example dataset of Spotify songs (roughly 30k rows). The code can be found in the lib-usage-demo
folder.
To install it locally, navigate to the folder and run yarn
followed by yarn dev
.
This awesome tutorial by Grant Custer on Observable helped me get started with implementation. However, quite a bit of additional work was required to get things working in React.
Creating a proper React library (and downloadable NPM package) was even more time-consuming and quite a bit of a pain 😅
I turned this into a library with the help of TSDX, a project whose intention is to make the setup of the codebase for JavaScript/TypeScript libraries easier (including React component libraries). Unfortunately it is no longer maintained and a bunch of stuff does not work properly anymore (gotta love Web Dev - things get "outdated" soo quickly lol), forcing me to find hacks to work around it. Maybe for my next project I should rather create everything from scratch - then I would at least understand more of what's going on under the hood. Alternatively, I might some day migrate to TurboRepo, which could apparently also be used for projects like this one.
I followed this tutorial to get Tailwind CSS working inside my project. Maybe it might be useful to you for your own work, too.
- axis tick rotation (not as simple as expected to implement)
- legend positioning
- smarter plot margin config
- broken zoom after window/canvas resize
TSDX scaffolds new libraries inside /src
. I have also set up a Vite App using my library inside lib-usage-example
.
The recommended workflow is to run TSDX in one terminal:
yarn start
This builds to /dist
and runs the project in watch mode so any edits you save inside src
causes a rebuild to /dist
.
Then, run either Storybook or the library usage example app:
Run inside another terminal:
yarn storybook
This loads the stories from ./stories
.
NOTE: Stories should reference the components as if using the library, similar to the example playground. This means importing from the root project directory. This has been aliased in the tsconfig and the storybook webpack config as a helper.
Run the following inside the terminal:
cd lib-usage-demo
yarn # install dependencies
yarn start
The example app uses React 18.
Out of the box, the app will not work as react-big-dataset-scatterplot
is not included in the package.json
(for deployment it would need to be added by running yarn add react-big-dataset-scatterplot
). Instead it is meant to be used during development with the current version of the package (from the dist
folder in the root directory). For this to work, we need to link the package like this:
- Switch to the parent directory and run
yarn link
there. - Go back to the example app directory and run
yarn link react-big-dataset-scatterplot
.
yarn should from now on use a symlink for the library during development, which means that always automatically the most recent version is used without having to run yarn
on every change to the library package.
Additional note: The line import 'react-big-dataset-scatterplot/dist/tailwind.css';
inside main.tsx
is important! If this is not included Tailwind styles used by the library are not applied (or in this case, any Tailwind class that is not already used in the rest of the app does NOT work).
yarn build
yarn test
Jest tests are theoretically set up by TSDX to run with yarn test
. I don't use tests though :)
Calculates the real cost of your library using size-limit with yarn size
and visualize it with yarn analyze
.
TSDX uses Rollup as a bundler and generates multiple rollup configs for various module formats and build settings. See Optimizations for details.
tsconfig.json
is set up to interpret dom
and esnext
types, as well as react
for jsx
. I have adjusted it according to my needs.
Two actions were added by TSDX by default:
main
which installs deps w/ cache, lints, tests, and builds on all pushes against a Node and OS matrix (changed that a bit, removing Node 14 as it is close to end of life anyway)size
which comments cost comparison of your library on every pull request using size-limit
Please see the main tsdx
optimizations docs. In particular, know that you can take advantage of development-only optimizations:
// ./types/index.d.ts
declare var __DEV__: boolean;
// inside your code...
if (__DEV__) {
console.log('foo');
}
You can also choose to install and use invariant and warning functions.
CJS, ESModules, and UMD module formats are supported.
The appropriate paths should be configured in package.json
and dist/index.js
accordingly. If any issues come up I will have to find a solution myself as the TSDX is not maintained anymore lol