Tutorials on Data

When faced with a need to visualise data, many developers' first instinct is to reach for a 3rd-party charting library. There's nothing wrong with this: there are several robust and full-featured libraries out there, and it's usually smart to leverage existing, good quality code. But we shouldn't forget that Angular, coupled with modern CSS features, also provides a great base on which to create our own, bespoke visualisation components. Doing so gives us the ability to tailor them to our exact use-cases, and avoid the inevitable trade-offs and bloat that comes with trying to solve for the general case of visualisation and charting. Also, creating visualisation components is just plain fun. In this article, we'll explore the process of creating a bar chart component for Angular. Even if you've created similar components before, the approach here might surprise you. We won't be rendering to a canvas element, or to dynamic SVG. We won't be using D3, or any dependencies besides those that come with a standard Angular CLI app. We won't be using any listeners or polling to detect resizes and run complex and flaky layout code. Instead, we'll strive to use modern CSS features, in particular grid and custom properties, to build the component's layout in a declarative and automatically responsive way. The finished chart can be viewed in this simple demo , or in a more complex demo .