I have been trying for the last week to find a way to make JFreeChart display something similar to the image below. Basically you are looking at three series (upper, middle, lower) with a fill inbetween. And underneath there is a (light green) fill color, or an area chart as some would perhaps call it - no meaning, just for looks.
The only thing really missing from what I have come up with is the last part: the fill underneath / area chart:
I even tried to subclass XYDifferenceRenderer and combine it with the renderer for Areachart, but I could not control the height of the areachart, basically filling up the plot to the top. So that was a no-go. Having created as simple rendererer to create rounded bar charts earlier, I thought that I might be able to change the code for XYDifferenceRenderer. But the code for XYDifferenceRenderer is quite a handful of geometry and inner workings of JFree chart, and the task was a bit overwhelming. So any tips on how to achieve this effect in any "normal" way (that does not involve hacking JFreeChart's inner workings)?
Found an old post describing how to use two renderers in the same plot, which was just the thing in this case.
To get a fill underneath you need to
- create two new series
- one is the lower bound of the difference plot
- the other is the values at the bottom of the plot - often just zero. Easily got by calling
plot.getRangeAxis().getLowerBound()
- add them to a new dataset and add this to the plot
I was unaware that a plot could have several datasets. Turns out one can just use an index to access them.
- create a new renderer for the "fill" dataset
- create a new renderer
- set the right fill paint
- set the rendererer for the new dataset to be the new renderer
The code is something akin to the following, where the fill Paint obviously is up to you:
static void addFill(Plot plot) {
XYSeries lowerLimitSeries = ((XYSeriesCollection) (plot.getDataset())).getSeries(1);
XYSeriesCollection fillSet = new XYSeriesCollection();
double lowerBound = plot.getRangeAxis().getLowerBound();
fillSet.addSeries(lowerLimitSeries);
fillSet.addSeries(createLowerFillSeries(lowerLimitSeries, lowerBound));
plot.setDataset(1, fillSet);
Paint fillPaint = Color.GREEN;
XYDifferenceRenderer fillRenderer = new XYDifferenceRenderer(fillPaint, fillPaint, false);
fillRenderer.setSeriesStroke(0, new BasicStroke(0)); //do not show
fillRenderer.setSeriesStroke(1, new BasicStroke(0)); //do not show
plot.setRenderer(1, fillRenderer);
...
}
static XYSeries createLowerFillSeries(XYSeries lowerLimitSeries, double lowerLimit) {
int size = lowerLimitSeries.getItems().size();
XYSeries res = new XYSeries("lowerFillSeries");
for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) res.add(new XYDataItem(lowerLimitSeries.getX(i), lowerLimit));
return res;
}