New call signature for Plotly.plot

Problem: Frames cannot be passed to the initial call to Plotly.plot. I don’t think breaking changes are required to change that fact, so this might be nice before it’s integrated in a bunch of different places. You also have to unpack plotly JSON data that almost certainly has the format:

{
  "data": [],
  "layout": {},
  "config": {},
  "frames": []
}

(Note: config is not fully serializable)

Currently to create a plot, you must run

Plotly.plot(gd, d.data, d.layout, d.config).then(function() {
  return Plotly.addFrames(gd, d.frames);
});

Possible solutions

It’s not bad, but the extra step seems unnecessary. Alternate proposed forms that could be implemented without breaking changes by overloading Plotly.plot:

Plotly.plot(gd, d.data, d.layout, d.config, d.frames);

Frames could simply be appended, though config seems nice as a final argument. Switching the last two arguments:

Plotly.plot(gd, d.data, d.layout, d.frames, d.config);

This case could be distinguished from the current form by the presence of an Array-typed fourth argument.

Taking a different approach and passing a single object:

Plotly.plot({
  container: gd,
  data: [],
  layout: {},
  config: {},
  frames: []
});

Except neither gd nor config are serializable, in general. Extracting the gd part, we get:

Plotly.plot(gd, {
  data: [],
  layout: {},
  config: {},
  frames: []
});

I rather like this final form since with some non-serializable exceptions in config (specifics?), you could simply pass fetched data toPlotly.plot in one go, i.e.:

fetch('path/to/my/data.json').then(function(d) {
  Plotly.plot(gd, d);
});

Which is nice and short, but then at the end of all of this, the conclusion is that this all exists only to save a bit of typing. I think it’s still worth discussing though since it seems sub-ideal that you can’t fully pass data (missing: frames) to a plot in a single command.

cc: @etpinard @chriddyp

[etpinard]

closed by https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js/pull/1054

[rreusser]

@monfera yeah, was at least thinking it would auto-append a div to document.body and then only operate on the div.