Automatic granularity when using dtick and tick0?

[matg]

Hello everybody, I find myself in need of customizing an axis so that the ticks show the last day of each trimester instead of the first day of the following one.
While I was successful in doing so, I also noticed that providing the dtick and tick0 parameters somehow disabled Plotly’s default behavior of decreasing the axis’ granularity if it becomes too “crowded”.

• Desired output (note that it doesn’t have to be annual - this is merely the optimal setting for the current axis scale):

  

• layout.xaxis.dtick = 'M3'
layout.xaxis.tick0 = '2000-03-31' (correct, but too granular):

  

• layout.xaxis.dtick = 'M3'
layout.xaxis.tick0 = '2000-03-31'
layout.xaxis.tickmode = 'auto'
layout.xaxis.nticks = 7 (doesn’t seem to work):

  

I feel like I’m missing something obvious here. Thanks for your help!

[etienne]

That’s correct setting tickmode: 'auto' disables dtick and tick0.

[etienne]

Upcoming feature https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js/pull/1965 might help you out.

[matg]

That does look like what I need! Thanks again!

EDIT: on second thought, I’m not too sure. How would it work? The way I see it, this would allow me to, say, drop the day if I zoom out enough, but it won’t actually let me hide some of the ticks.