Bar charts disappear while animating

[hellochar]

Hey Plotly, I'm trying to animate a zoom into a bar chart (see http://codepen.io/hellochar/pen/ozEBXr), but it looks like the bar charts disappear when they're being animated? Is that something intentional or something I'm doing wrong?

Also orthogonally, it looks like many of the different layout properties aren't animated smoothly - for instance, margin, width, height, bargap, xaxis.domain - is this expected?

Thanks for your time,
Xiaohan

[rreusser]

Thanks for the report, @hellochar! The short answer is that all of the animation effort so far has gone into 1) infrastructure for defining what animation means in plotly, and 2) animating scatter traces. I expected bar charts to fall back to instantaneous updates so I'm not thrilled that they simply disappear while updating.

The first step that's necessary to fix this is to work d3 element persistence into bar charts. There's some work going on with bar charts at the moment that I need to avoid conflicting with, but I'd really like to tackle them as soon as that's complete. Long story short, I think it will be about two weeks until I can get this implemented and cleaned up. Apologies for the phased implementation, but it's very helpful to hear about the interest!

[rreusser]

One bug to fix, then I'm on it! Follow #1143 for more specific updates on bar charts.

[etpinard]

PR #1647 was pretty close to getting this done. 😞

[darabos]

I thought I'd have a stab at this. I've sent a PR against my fork as a preview: darabos#2. What do you think? I'm trying to follow the scatter animation code and the previous PRs. With a simple stacked bar chart it looks good so far.

I'm happy to look into the TODO items that were listed on #1647. I just wanted to check with you first. Thanks!

[woodwards]

You can do a workaround using fat lines that look like bars:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56623868/animate-plotly-plot-in-shiny-when-data-changes/56623991#56623991

[etpinard]

Merging into #3896 - which has a few recent comments.