LinkedIn
Twitter
Integrating analytics directly into your applications can offer your users valuable insights without disrupting their workflow. While basic visualizations are a good start, true integration and branding demand deeper customization. Tools like the Chart Config Editor in Looker provide this granular control, essential for crafting a seamless embedded analytics experience.
What is the Chart Config Editor?
The Chart Config Editor allows you to customize formatting options on visualizations that utilize the HighCharts API, including most standard Cartesian charts such as column charts, bar charts, and line charts. By providing access to the underlying charting library's configuration, the editor enables customizations that go beyond the standard settings available in the Looker UI.
For those users leveraging Gemini in Looker features, the Visualization Assistant can also help generate the necessary JSON code snippets from text prompts, accelerating the customization process.
How can it elevate developer experience to build delightful embedded analytics experience for users?
The Chart Config Editor provides crucial capabilities for building an embedded analytics platform through support for dynamic field references in conditional formatting and annotations, well-structured documentation, and the ability to save configurations as templates,,enabling a deep level of visual customization and integration.
You can:
- Make charts that highlight key data points based on smart, data-driven rules.
- Add helpful notes directly on charts, pulled from your data.
- Use docs and examples to quickly style charts or make new ones.
- Quickly put custom-styled charts into your app using saved templates.
Some Customization Capabilities
- Basic Styling: You can adjust fundamental visual aspects like background colors and the color of axis titles and labels, and fine-tune tooltip appearance, including background and text colors, and format the content of the tooltip itself.
Conditional Formatting: You can apply conditional formatting to series values based on the mean calculation for a measure. Use the `formatters` parameter to reference `mean` to change color of specific bars based on comparison to mean.
- Annotations and Captions: You can Add context to your charts with annotations or captions. Create dynamic annotations that pull their text directly from your data fields, providing data-driven explanations on the fly.
- Line Styles: Change the appearance of lines in your charts, transforming solid lines into dotted or dashed patterns.
Creating New Visualization Types
The Chart Config Editor lets you go beyond default charts in Looker and build entirely new visualization types, such as bullet charts, solid gauges, streamgraphs, treemaps, sankey charts, and more unique options.
Solid gauge charts quickly display single metrics or progress towards a goal.
Streamgraphs visualize the evolving proportions and trends of multiple categories over time.
Saving and Sharing Configurations with Templates
Once you've created a custom configuration, you can save it as a template (note: this is a preview feature). Saving a template allows you to reuse the configuration across different visualizations or share it with other users as a starting point. To save a template, click Save as template in the editor dialog, give it a name and description, and save your code.
You can apply a saved template by clicking Saved templates in the editor dialog, selecting a template, and clicking Apply template. Applying a template will overwrite any code currently in the Chart Config Editor.
Keep in mind that embed users cannot create, edit, or apply templates. Not all templates may work well for every visualization type, so it's a good practice to note the intended visualization type in the template description. You can also edit or delete saved templates from the Saved templates dialog.
The Value for Embedded Analytics Platforms
The Chart Config Editor is critcal for developers and administrators setting up embedded Looker experiences. When embedding analytics, the goal is for dashboards and visualizations to feel native to the host application, not like a separate tool. By leveraging the Chart Config Editor, you can ensure that embedded visualizations are not just functional, but also aesthetically integrated and optimized for the specific use case.
The Chart Config Editor provides the deep control needed for seamless integration:
- Branding Consistency: Precisely match chart elements like colors, backgrounds, and tooltips to your application's design.
- Enhanced Data Communication: Use conditional formatting to highlight key data points, drawing users' attention to critical trends or outliers within their workflow.
- Tailored Visual Representations: Create entirely new visualization types beyond standard charts, designing custom visuals specifically for your application's data and context.
The end result is a more professional, intuitive, and valuable embedded analytics experience that truly feels like part of your application.
Explore the possibilities and start crafting embedded analytics that seamlessly blend with your application, delight your users, and unlock deeper insights. Visit our official documentation to dive in.
