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Better schema declarations for array attributes that don't scale with coordinate arrays #1894
Description
See #1891 for context.
At the moment, axis.tickvals, axis.ticktext, axis.categoryarray, colorbar.tickvals and colorbar.ticktext are listed as valType: 'data_array'. This is causing issues for colorbar.tickvals and colorbar.ticktext as routines that use the output of PlotSchema.findArrayAttributes are expecting those data arrays to scale with the coordinate arrays.
So, as @alexcjohnson points out, maybe we should tag these uncorrelated data arrays in the schema (e.g. colorbar.tickvals would have uncorrelatedArray: true) - which would be a lot more robust than the solution in aa93123
But perhaps, we should make these attributes something else then valType: 'data_array' instead. For plotly.js, setting those attributes to valType: 'info_array' with freeLength: true would work, but that might break a few things downstream (e.g. the plotly workspace).
Somewhat related: we should also think about correlated arrays mean for trace with 2D coordinate arrays, so that we can eventually extend filter and sort transform to 2D data.
Activity
rreusser commentedon Jul 18, 2017
A quick grep shows three things in plotly.js that depend on
'data_array':So seems not tightly coupled within plotly.js. Does changing the field type affect the backend processing? On principle though, I think it'd be nice if
data_arraymeant identically that it has 1-1 correspondence with the trace data.etpinard commentedon Feb 26, 2018
PR #2399 added free-length info array declarations (to support
layout.gridandlayout.grid.subplots).So perhaps, we could change attributes like
ticktextandtickvalsto free-lengthinfo_arrayinstead of their currentdata_arrayval type? That way, we could get rid of this ugly hack.gvwilson commentedon Jun 10, 2024
Hi - this issue has been sitting for a while, so as part of our effort to tidy up our public repositories I'm going to close it. If it's still a concern, we'd be grateful if you could open a new issue (with a short reproducible example if appropriate) so that we can add it to our stack. Cheers - @gvwilson