I came up with a hack to have updating image-based charts inside of cells in Coda. Here’s a live example: Charts in Cells. I’ve long wanted simple Sparkline charts in Coda to see how things change over time. I figured out how to do it using QuickChart.io, by making a simple URL request to generate a chart. Note there’s also an automation on my table so every time you adjust the Percent slider, it updates the Updates column with the information and regenerates the chart. You can use this technique for all sorts of live-updating charts that QuickChart.io or similar URL-based chart generators offer!
Hi @David_Kossnick ,
great example: thanks for sharing it!
Hopefully a wider integration with chart libraries (like this one suggested by @Bill_French, among the others) will come in the next future, but it’s a good way to temporarily cope with that.
Thanks!
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This is a great example of using external charting platforms and especially useful for creating sparklines.
I encourage the Codans to consider the nature of charting in the Coda platform and why no vendor should try to re-engineer all possible chart types and features. It’s a fools errand to believe that you can do better than D3, Vega, and others.
Two critical requirements come to mind given this really useful hack:
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Time-series data is often most valuable as it occurs. While HTTP requests are useful in many use cases, real-time streaming would be far better, thus eliminating the need for repeated requests and polling triggers.
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Sometimes the data for a given chart is only partially available in Coda - for example, the Coda table might include a customer ID and other meta information suitable for acquiring data from another source (think PubNub or Ably, or even Firebase and ElasticSearch). If the goal is to support data-science in a Coda environment, the model should embrace data acquisition and data visualization independently.
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