Custom buttons

Introduction to Data Visualization with Plotly in Python

Alex Scriven

Data Scientist

What can custom buttons do?

Custom buttons can:

Update the data or layout elements of a plot
- All of our update_layout() customizations could be in a button!
Assist with animations (beyond the scope of this course)

Custom buttons in Plotly

Added via an updatemenus argument with arguments:

type: buttons or dropdown
- We will cover dropdowns later!
direction: Button orientation
- Buttons can be beside (left) or on top of (down) each other
x/y: Floats to set the button positions
showactive: True/False to show the active (index of button) as pressed or not.
- The active button is the currently selected one.
buttons: A list of button objects

Plot type with buttons

fig = px.bar(
      data_frame=revenues, 
    x='Industry', y='Revenue',
    color='Industry')
fig.show()

Simple bar chart by industry

Button set up

my_buttons = [

{'label': "Bar plot",

 'method': "update",

 'args': [{"type": "bar"}]},

{'label': "scatterplot",

 'method': "update",

 'args': [{"type": "scatter", 'mode': 'markers'}]}

]

The args argument

One of the most confusing parts of Plotly!

Its structure is:

[{dictionary to send to data}, {dictionary to send to layout}]

Figure internal structure

Using args for layout updates

dir(fig.layout)

Figure layout elements

Update any of the arguments with 'args'

Using args for data updates

dir(fig.data[0])

Inside data layout

Some are familiar, and some will be helpful later

Button interactivity

fig.update_layout({
  'updatemenus': [{'type': "buttons",

                 'direction': 'down',
                 'x': 1.3, 'y': 0.5,

                 'showactive': True,
                 'active': 0,

                 'buttons': my_buttons}]
  })
fig.show()

Buttons

Let's practice!

Introduction to Data Visualization with Plotly in Python