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Visualising a property with data type "any"

Graphing Library Plotly.js
#1

Hi everybody,

We are trying to integrate the amazing Plotly graphs into the open-source Node-RED iot platform, but we are struggling to understand what the "any" type means.

Since Plotly offers a tremendous amount of properties, we use the information from the plot-schema.json file all over the place to automatically build our user interface:

image

How it works:

  1. When the user enters text in the “Property name” field, we show all corresponding available property names via autocomplete.
  2. As soon as the user presses Enter, we get information about that property from the scheme. For example:
    "marker": {
   "symbol": {
      "valType": "enumerated",
      "values": [
         0,
         "circle",
         100,
         "circle-open",
         200,
         "circle-dot",
         ...
      ],
      "dflt": "circle",
      "arrayOk": true,
      "role": "style",
      "editType": "style",
      "description": ".."
   },
  3. Based on the valType we know which kind of UI widget we need to show. For example a dropdown for an enumerated value.

And that all works fine! However now we see that there are 456 properties available with value type "any".
For example:

"x0": {
   "valType": "any",
   "dflt": 0,
   "role": "info",
   "editType": "calc+clearAxisTypes",
   "anim": true,
   "description": "Alternate to `x`. Builds a linear space of x coordinates. Use with `dx` where `x0` is the starting coordinate and `dx` the step."
},

Does anybody knows how we can handle those properties in our user interface, i.e. how can we visualise them?

Thanks a lot!
Bart Butenaers

#2

I’m sure others will have encountered this as an problem, has anyone any solution or advice please.