I am new to Angular and Flot, but am experienced with Jquery and Javascript. I am a bit confused about how to go about binding a Flot chart to Angular data models, since Flot is a JQuery plugin. I've searched around, but haven't been able to find an example.
I would also be happy to use highcharts, google-charts, or any other charting solution.
Since charting involves heavy DOM manipulation, directives are the way to go.
Data can be kept in the Controller
App.controller('Ctrl', function($scope) {
$scope.data = [[[0, 1], [1, 5], [2, 2]]];
});
And you can create a custom HTML tag1 specifying the model you want to get data from
<chart ng-model='data'></chart>
which angular can compile through a directive
App.directive('chart', function() {
return {
restrict: 'E',
link: function(scope, elem, attrs) {
var data = scope[attrs.ngModel];
$.plot(elem, data, {});
elem.show();
}
};
});
Example here.
This process is similar for most plugins that modify the DOM.
-*-
Also, you can watch for changes in the chart's underlying data and redraw it, so this way you can grab data through the $http service from your controller and update the view automatically. This can be achieved by modifying the linking function in the directive definition object
var chart = null,
opts = { };
scope.$watch(attrs.ngModel, function(v){
if(!chart){
chart = $.plot(elem, v , opts);
elem.show();
}else{
chart.setData(v);
chart.setupGrid();
chart.draw();
}
});
Notice the usage of Flot's API within the directive to achieve what we want.
Here the full example
1 Can be an attribute too.
To use jQuery plugins with angularJS, you have to wrap them in directives, you can find some exemples of jQuery plugins directives by reading the source code of angularUI directives: https://github.com/angular-ui/angular-ui/tree/master/modules/directives