Create a Timeline rendered by Highcharts.js

Provide a data frame with event data to create a visual and interactive timeline plot rendered by Highcharts. Simplest drawable dataframe can have columns `event` and `start`. This feature is facilitated by the `highcharter` package, so, this package needs to be installed before attempting to produce any `hc_vistime()` output. Note that the argument `col.fontcolor` is not supported here.

Usage

hc_vistime(
  data,
  col.event = "event",
  col.start = "start",
  col.end = "end",
  col.group = "group",
  col.color = "color",
  col.tooltip = "tooltip",
  optimize_y = TRUE,
  title = NULL,
  show_labels = TRUE,
  ...
)

Arguments

data

data.frame that contains the data to be visualized

col.event

(optional, character) the column name in data that contains event names. Default: event.

col.start

(optional, character) the column name in data that contains start dates. Default: start.

col.end

(optional, character) the column name in data that contains end dates. Default: end.

col.group

(optional, character) the column name in data to be used for grouping. Default: group.

col.color

(optional, character) the column name in data that contains colors for events. Can be hex codes (e.g., "#FF0000"), named colors (e.g., "red"), or categorical data to be auto-colored. Default: color, if not present, colors are chosen via RColorBrewer.

col.tooltip

(optional, character) the column name in data that contains the mouseover tooltips for the events. Default: tooltip, if not present, then tooltips are built from event name and date.

optimize_y

(optional, logical) distribute events on y-axis by smart heuristic (default), otherwise use order of input data.

title

(optional, character) the title to be shown on top of the timeline. Default: NULL.

show_labels

(optional, boolean) choose whether or not event labels shall be visible. Default: TRUE.

...

for deprecated arguments up to vistime 1.1.0 (like events, colors, ...)

Value

hc_vistime returns an object of class highchart and htmlwiget

See also

Functions ?vistime and ?gg_vistime for different charting engines (Plotly and ggplot2).

Examples

# presidents and vice presidents
pres <- data.frame(
  Position = rep(c("President", "Vice"), each = 3),
  Name = c("Washington", rep(c("Adams", "Jefferson"), 2), "Burr"),
  start = c("1789-03-29", "1797-02-03", "1801-02-03"),
  end = c("1797-02-03", "1801-02-03", "1809-02-03"),
  color = c("#cbb69d", "#603913", "#c69c6e")
)

hc_vistime(pres, col.event = "Position", col.group = "Name", title = "Presidents of the USA")
#> Registered S3 method overwritten by 'quantmod':
#>   method            from
#>   as.zoo.data.frame zoo 

#'
if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# ------ It is possible to change all attributes of the timeline using highcharter::hc_*():
data <- read.csv(text="event,start,end
                       Phase 1,2020-12-15,2020-12-24
                       Phase 2,2020-12-23,2020-12-29
                       Phase 3,2020-12-28,2021-01-06
                       Phase 4,2021-01-06,2021-02-02")

library(highcharter)
p <- hc_vistime(data, optimize_y = T, col.group = "event",
                title = "Highcharts customization example")
p %>% hc_title(style = list(fontSize=30)) %>%
      hc_yAxis(labels = list(style = list(fontSize=30, color="violet"))) %>%
      hc_xAxis(labels = list(style = list(fontSize=30, color="red"), rotation=30)) %>%
      hc_chart(backgroundColor = "lightgreen")
} # }