Sorting (ordering) the bars in a bar chart by the bar values with dc.js

Gautam picture Gautam · Aug 8, 2014 · Viewed 8.9k times · Source

How can I sort the x-axis (dimension) in the dc.js example by the computed value of the dimension instead of by the name of the dimension itself?

For example, consider the dc.js example for an Ordinal Bar Chart at:

https://github.com/dc-js/dc.js/blob/master/web/examples/ord.html

How can I sort the x-axis in descending order of fruit counts?

Here is what I have tried: (jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/gautam/re9r9kk7/ )

var counts = [
  {name: "apple", cnt: 10},
  {name: "orange", cnt: 15},
  {name: "banana", cnt: 12},
  {name: "grapefruit", cnt: 2},
  {name: "grapefruit", cnt: 4}
];

var ndx            = crossfilter(counts),
    fruitDimension = ndx.dimension(function(d) {return d.name;}),
    sumGroup       = fruitDimension.group().reduceSum(function(d) {return d.cnt;});

chart
  .width(768)
  .height(380)
  .x(d3.scale.ordinal())
  .xUnits(dc.units.ordinal)
  .brushOn(false)
  .xAxisLabel("Fruit")
  .yAxisLabel("Quantity Sold")
  .dimension(fruitDimension)
  .barPadding(0.1)
  .outerPadding(0.05)
  .group(sumGroup);

Answer

Gordon picture Gordon · Aug 13, 2014

There is a function on the base mixin called chart.ordering().

It is specifically for changing the order of ordinal values when the alphabetical default is not wanted. The function you pass to this function takes a {key,value} pair and returns a value to order on.

For ordering the bars in descending order by value, you'd do

chart.ordering(function(d) { return -d.value; })