flot - show time axis without gaps

Question

I'm trying to customize jQuery Flot to remove gaps between dots on time axis. Look at the top image:

It shows the data for two days, and I bet you spot the night. What I want to do is to get rid of this annoying gap in the middle of the chart. Any suggestions how to do this?

Answer 1

Too bad I can't accept a comment as an answer, since the answer from George Roberts from Mark's link worked smoothly.

So what I had to do is to change the mode of the flot from 'time' to null and then emulate a time axis.

I've created two arrays: the first one with data for the graph and the second one with timestamps:

for (var i=0; i<json.length; i++ ) {
    dotsData.push( [i, json[i].value] );
    ticks.push( json[i].date );
    }                       
}

Time axis emulation:

// flot options
... xaxis: { tickFormatter: function(val) { return formTicks(val, ticks) } } ...

// formTicks function
function formTicks(val, ticksArr) {
    var tick = ticksArr[val];

    if ( tick != undefined ) {
        tick = new Date( tick );

        var hours = tick.getHours(),
            minutes = tick.getMinutes();

            tick = hours+':'+minutes;
    }
    else { tick = '' }

    return tick
}

It solves the problem, but it's hard to distinguish one day from another, so I added markings:

var markings = [],
    firstDay = new Date( ticks[0] ).getDate();

    for (var i=1; i<ticks.length; i++) {
        var loopDay = new Date( ticks[i] ).getDate();
        if ( loopDay != firstDay ) {
            var marking = {
                color: '#000000',
                lineWidth: 1,
                xaxis: { from: i, to: i }
            }

        markings.push( marking )

        firstDay = loopDay; // loop through all days
    }
}

// flot options
grid: { markings: markings }

The result:

Answer 2

Use transform and inverseTransform, which were designed for situations such as this. See the following portion of the FLOT documentation.

"transform" and "inverseTransform" are callbacks you can put in to change the way the data is drawn. You can design a function to compress or expand certain parts of the axis non-linearly, e.g. suppress weekends or compress far away points with a logarithm or some other means. When Flot draws the plot, each value is first put through the transform function. Here's an example, the x axis can be turned into a natural logarithm axis with the following code:

xaxis: {
        transform: function (v) { return Math.log(v); },
        inverseTransform: function (v) { return Math.exp(v); }
       }