Lightweight Charts in Vue.js with vue2-frappe

When it comes to charting on the web, there are two main heavy-hitters: D3.js and Chart.js. But sometimes you don’t need a 500 pound gorilla. Sometimes you just want simple SVG charts that do exactly what you expect. That’s where Frappe Charts fits in. It’s a tiny, vanilla JS library that provides full-featured, animated, interactive SVG charts. And with a simple component wrapper, you can use it with Vue.js!

Getting Started

Start off by installing vue2-frappe. (I’m assuming you’ve already got a Vue.js project up and running.)

$ npm install --save vue2-frappe

Next, enable the plugin. (All it does is register the component.)

import Vue from 'vue';
import VueFrappe from 'vue2-frappe';
import App from './App.vue';

Vue.use(VueFrappe);

new Vue({
  el: '#app',
  render: h => h(App)
});

Making Charts

vue2-frappe is a simple wrapper for Frappe Charts that simply provides the configuration options to frappe as component properties. You you can directly use Frappe Chart’s documentation by changing top-level option keys into Vue.js property bindings.

<template>
  <div id="app">
    <h2>Chart: Benedict's Weight</h2>
    <!-- id - Every chart must have an id. -->
    <!-- title - The title displayed on the chart -->
    <!-- type - The type of chart: line, bar, percent, pie, or axis-mixed. -->
    <!-- labels - Names for each value on the x-axis. -->
    <!-- height- Optional: How tall the chart should be. -->
    <!-- colors - Separate colors for each dataset. -->
    <!-- lineOptions - Additional options for how to display line charts. See docs. -->
    <!-- datasets - An array of objects containing names and values for each data set. -->
    <vue-frappe
      id="my-chart-id"
      title="Benedict's Weight From 2017-2018 (lbs)"
      type="line"
      :labels="['Jan', 'Feb', 'Mar', 'Apr', 'May', 'Jun', 'Jul', 'Aug', 'Sep', 'Oct', 'Nov', 'Dec']"
      :height="650"
      :colors="['#008F68', '#FAE042']"
      :lineOptions="{regionFill: 1}"
      :datasets="[
        {name: '2017', values: benedictsWeight2017},
        {name: '2018', values: benedictsWeight2018}
      ]"
    ></vue-frappe>
    <p>Conclusion: Benedict needs to go on a diet.</p>
  </div>
</template>

<script>

export default {
  name: 'app',
  data() {
    return {
      benedictsWeight2017: [480, 485, 491, 489, 485, 490, 497, 510, 512, 521, 530, 545],
      benedictsWeight2018: [540, 575, 570, 555, 572, 580, 585, 587, 588, 590, 592, 590]
    }
  }
}
</script>

The above should result in a chart like the one below:

And that’s just the beginning. Frappe Charts supports a variety of other types of charts - pie charts, bar charts, percentage charts, heatmaps, and advanced line and mixed charts. Take a look at their documentation!