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In [ ]:
#r "nuget: Plotly.NET, 2.0.0-preview.16"
#r "nuget: Plotly.NET.Interactive, 2.0.0-preview.16"

open Plotly.NET


# Plotly.NET basics¶

This section is WIP.

## GenericChart¶

Plotly.NET is a .NET wrapper for creation of plotly charts written in F#. This means that, under the hood, all functionality creates JSON objects that can be rendered by plotly.

The central type that gets created by all Chart constructors is GenericChart, which itself represents either a single chart or a multi chart (as a Discriminate Union type). It looks like this:

In [ ]:
[<NoComparison>]
type GenericChart =
| Chart of Trace * Layout * Config * DisplayOptions
| MultiChart of Trace list * Layout * Config * DisplayOptions


As you can see, a GenericChart consists of four top level objects - Trace (multiple of those in the case of a MultiChart) , Layout, Config, and DisplayOptions.

• Trace is in principle the representation of a dataset on a chart, including for example the data itself, color and shape of the visualization, etc.
• Layout is everything of the chart that is not dataset specifivc - e.g. the shape and style of axes, the chart title, etc.
• Config is an object that configures high level properties of the chart like making all chart elements editable or the tool bar on top
• DisplayOptions is an object that contains meta information about how the html document that contains the chart.

## Working with GenericCharts¶

### Dynamic object style¶

Plotly.NET has multiple abstraction layers to work with GenericCharts. The prime directive for all functions provided by this library is the construction of valid plotly JSON objects. For this purpose, Trace, Layout, and Config (and many other internal objects) are inheriting from DynamicObj, an extension of DynamicObject which makes it possible to set arbitraryly named and typed properties of these objects via the ? operator.

So if you want to set any kind of property on one of these objects you can do it in a very declarative way like this:

In [3]:
let myTrace = Trace("scatter") // create a scatter trace
myTrace?x <- [0;1;2] // set the x property (the x dimension of the data)
myTrace?y <- [0;1;2] // set the y property (the y dimension of the data)

GenericChart.ofTraceObject false myTrace // create a generic chart (layout and config are empty objects. When using useDefaults = true, default styling will be applied.)
|> Chart.show


lets have a look at the trace object that will be created. The relevant section of the html generated with Chart.Show is the following:

var data = [{"type":"scatter","x":[0,1,2],"y":[0,1,2]}];