NEWS.txt

Flot x.x
--------

API changes:

Support for time series has been moved into a plugin,
jquery.flot.time.js. This results in less code if time series are not
used. The functionality remains the same (plus timezone support, as
described below); however, the plugin must be included if axis.mode
is set to "time".

When the axis mode is "time", the axis option "timezone" can be set to
null, "browser", or a particular timezone (e.g. "America/New_York") to
control how the dates are displayed. If null, the dates are displayed
as UTC. If "browser", the dates are displayed in the time zone of the
user's browser.

Date/time formatting has changed and now follows a proper subset
of the standard strftime specifiers. Additionally, if a strftime
function is found in the Date object's prototype, it will be used
instead of the built-in formatter.

Axis labels are now drawn with canvas text with some parsing to
support newlines. This solves various issues but also means that they
no longer support HTML markup, can be accessed as DOM elements or
styled directly with CSS. Some older browsers lack this function of
the canvas API (this doesn't affect IE); if this is a problem, either
continue using an older version of Flot or try an emulation helper
such as canvas-text or Flashcanvas.

The base and overlay canvas are now using the CSS classes "flot-base"
and "flot-overlay" to prevent accidental clashes (issue 540).


Changes:

- Date/time formatting follows proper subset of strftime specifiers,
  and support added for Date.prototype.strftime, if found (patch by
  Mark Cote, issues 419 and 558).

- Fixed display of year ticks (patch by Mark Cote, issue 195).

- Support for time series moved to plugin (patch by Mark Cote).

- Display time series in different time zones (patch by Knut Forkalsrud,
  issue 141).

- Canvas text support for labels (sponsored by YCharts.com).

- Support for setting the interval between redraws of the overlay
  canvas with redrawOverlayInterval (suggested in issue 185).

- Support for multiple thresholds in thresholds plugin (patch by
  Arnaud Bellec, issue 523).

- Support for plotting categories/textual data directly with new
  categories plugin.

- Tick generators now get the whole axis rather than just min/max.

- Added processOffset and drawBackground hooks (suggested in issue 639).

- Added a grid "margin" option to set the space between the canvas edge
  and the grid.

- Prevent the pie example page from generating single-slice pies (patch
  by Shane Reustle).

- In addition to "left" and "center", bars now recognize "right" as an
  alignment option. (patch by Michael Mayer, issue 520)

- Switched from toFixed to a much faster default tickFormatter. (patch by
  Clemens Stolle)

- Added to a more helpful error when using a time-mode axis without
  including the flot.time plugin. (patch by Yael Elmatad)

- Added a legend "sorted" option to control sorting of legend entries
  independent of their series order. (patch by Tom Cleaveland)

- Added a series "highlightColor" option to control the color of the
  translucent overlay that identifies the dataset when the mouse hovers
  over it. (patch by Eric Wendelin and Nate Abele, issues 168 and 299)

- Added a plugin jquery.flot.errorbars, with an accompanying example,
  that adds the ability to plot error bars, commonly used in many kinds
  of statistical data visualizations. (patch by Rui Pereira, issue 215)

- The legend now omits entries whose labelFormatter returns null.
  (patch by Tom Cleaveland, Christopher Lambert, and Simon Strandgaard)

- Added support for high pixel density (retina) displays, resulting in
  much crisper charts on such devices. (patch by Olivier Guerriat)


Bug fixes

- Fix problem with null values and pie plugin (patch by gcruxifix,
  issue 500).

- Fix problem with threshold plugin and bars (based on patch by
  kaarlenkaski, issue 348).

- Fix axis box calculations so the boxes include the outermost part of
  the labels too.

- Fix problem with event clicking and hovering in IE 8 by updating
  Excanvas and removing previous work-around (test case by Ara
  Anjargolian).

- Fix issues with blurry 1px border when some measures aren't integer
  (reported by Ara Anjargolian).

- Fix bug with formats in the data processor (reported by Peter Hull,
  issue 534).

- Prevent i from being declared global in extractRange (reported by
  Alexander Obukhov, issue 627).

- Throw errors in a more cross-browser-compatible manner (patch by
  Eddie Kay)

- Prevent pie slice outlines from being drawn when the stroke width is
  zero (reported by Chris Minett, issue 585)

- Updated the navigate plugin's inline copy of jquery.mousewheel to fix
  Webkit zoom problems (reported by Hau Nguyen, issue 685).

- Axis labels no longer appear as decimals rather than integers in
  certain cases. (patch by Clemens Stolle, issue 541)

- Automatic color generation no longer produces only whites and blacks
  when there are many series. (patch by David Schnur and Tom Cleaveland)


Flot 0.7
--------

API changes:

Multiple axes support. Code using dual axes should be changed from
using x2axis/y2axis in the options to using an array (although
backwards-compatibility hooks are in place). For instance,

  {
    xaxis: { ... }, x2axis: { ... },
    yaxis: { ... }, y2axis: { ... }
  }

becomes

  {
    xaxes: [ { ... }, { ... } ],
    yaxes: [ { ... }, { ... } ]
  }

Note that if you're just using one axis, continue to use the
xaxis/yaxis directly (it now sets the default settings for the
arrays). Plugins touching the axes must be ported to take the extra
axes into account, check the source to see some examples.

A related change is that the visibility of axes is now auto-detected.
So if you were relying on an axis to show up even without any data in
the chart, you now need to set the axis "show" option explicitly.

"tickColor" on the grid options is now deprecated in favour of a
corresponding option on the axes, so { grid: { tickColor: "#000" }}
becomes { xaxis: { tickColor: "#000"}, yaxis: { tickColor: "#000"} },
but if you just configure a base color Flot will now autogenerate a
tick color by adding transparency. Backwards-compatibility hooks are
in place.

Final note: now that IE 9 is coming out with canvas support, you may
want to adapt the excanvas include to skip loading it in IE 9 (the
examples have been adapted thanks to Ryley Breiddal). An alternative
to excanvas using Flash has also surfaced, if your graphs are slow in
IE, you may want to give it a spin:

  http://code.google.com/p/flashcanvas/


Changes:

- Support for specifying a bottom for each point for line charts when
  filling them, this means that an arbitrary bottom can be used
  instead of just the x axis (based on patches patiently provided by
  Roman V. Prikhodchenko).
- New fillbetween plugin that can compute a bottom for a series from
  another series, useful for filling areas between lines (see new
  example percentiles.html for a use case).
- More predictable handling of gaps for the stacking plugin, now all
  undefined ranges are skipped.
- Stacking plugin can stack horizontal bar charts.
- Navigate plugin now redraws the plot while panning instead of only
  after the fact (can be disabled by setting the pan.frameRate option
  to null), raised by lastthemy (issue 235).
- Date formatter now accepts %0m and %0d to get a zero-padded month or
  day (issue raised by Maximillian Dornseif).
- Revamped internals to support an unlimited number of axes, not just
  dual (sponsored by Flight Data Services,
  www.flightdataservices.com).
- New setting on axes, "tickLength", to control the size of ticks or
  turn them off without turning off the labels.
- Axis labels are now put in container divs with classes, for instance
  labels in the x axes can be reached via ".xAxis .tickLabel".
- Support for setting the color of an axis (sponsored by Flight Data
  Services, www.flightdataservices.com).
- Tick color is now auto-generated as the base color with some
  transparency (unless you override it).
- Support for aligning ticks in the axes with "alignTicksWithAxis" to
  ensure that they appear next to each other rather than in between,
  at the expense of possibly awkward tick steps (sponsored by Flight
  Data Services, www.flightdataservices.com).
- Support for customizing the point type through a callback when
  plotting points and new symbol plugin with some predefined point
  types (sponsored by Utility Data Corporation).
- Resize plugin for automatically redrawing when the placeholder
  changes size, e.g. on window resizes (sponsored by Novus Partners).
  A resize() method has been added to plot object facilitate this.
- Support Infinity/-Infinity for plotting asymptotes by hacking it
  into +/-Number.MAX_VALUE (reported by rabaea.mircea).
- Support for restricting navigate plugin to not pan/zoom an axis (based
  on patch by kkaefer).
- Support for providing the drag cursor for the navigate plugin as an
  option (based on patch by Kelly T. Moore).
- Options for controlling whether an axis is shown or not (suggestion
  by Timo Tuominen) and whether to reserve space for it even if it
  isn't shown.
- New attribute $.plot.version with the Flot version as a string.
- The version comment is now included in the minified jquery.flot.min.js.
- New options.grid.minBorderMargin for adjusting the minimum margin
  provided around the border (based on patch by corani, issue 188).
- Refactor replot behaviour so Flot tries to reuse the existing
  canvas, adding shutdown() methods to the plot (based on patch by
  Ryley Breiddal, issue 269). This prevents a memory leak in Chrome
  and hopefully makes replotting faster for those who are using $.plot
  instead of .setData()/.draw(). Also update jQuery to 1.5.1 to
  prevent IE leaks fixed in jQuery.
- New real-time line chart example.

- New hooks: drawSeries, shutdown

Bug fixes:

- Fixed problem with findNearbyItem and bars on top of each other
  (reported by ragingchikn, issue 242).
- Fixed problem with ticks and the border (based on patch from
  ultimatehustler69, issue 236).
- Fixed problem with plugins adding options to the series objects.
- Fixed a problem introduced in 0.6 with specifying a gradient with {
  brightness: x, opacity: y }.
- Don't use $.browser.msie, check for getContext on the created canvas
  element instead and try to use excanvas if it's not found (fixes IE
  9 compatibility).
- highlight(s, index) was looking up the point in the original s.data
  instead of in the computed datapoints array, which breaks with
  plugins that modify the datapoints (such as the stacking plugin).
  Issue 316 reported by curlypaul924.
- More robust handling of axis from data passed in from getData()
  (problem reported by Morgan).
- Fixed problem with turning off bar outline (issue 253, fix by Jordi
  Castells).
- Check the selection passed into setSelection in the selection
  plugin, to guard against errors when synchronizing plots (fix by Lau
  Bech Lauritzen).
- Fix bug in crosshair code with mouseout resetting the crosshair even
  if it is locked (fix by Lau Bech Lauritzen and Banko Adam).
- Fix bug with points plotting using line width from lines rather than
  points.
- Fix bug with passing non-array 0 data (for plugins that don't expect
  arrays, patch by vpapp1).
- Fix errors in JSON in examples so they work with jQuery 1.4.2
  (fix reported by honestbleeps, issue 357).
- Fix bug with tooltip in interacting.html, this makes the tooltip
  much smoother (fix by bdkahn). Fix related bug inside highlighting
  handler in Flot.
- Use closure trick to make inline colorhelpers plugin respect
  jQuery.noConflict(true), renaming the global jQuery object (reported
  by Nick Stielau).
- Listen for mouseleave events and fire a plothover event with empty
  item when it occurs to drop highlights when the mouse leaves the
  plot (reported by by outspirit).
- Fix bug with using aboveData with a background (reported by
  amitayd).
- Fix possible excanvas leak (report and suggested fix by tom9729).
- Fix bug with backwards compatibility for shadowSize = 0 (report and
  suggested fix by aspinak).
- Adapt examples to skip loading excanvas (fix by Ryley Breiddal).
- Fix bug that prevent a simple f(x) = -x transform from working
  correctly (fix by Mike, issue 263).
- Fix bug in restoring cursor in navigate plugin (reported by Matteo
  Gattanini, issue 395).
- Fix bug in picking items when transform/inverseTransform is in use
  (reported by Ofri Raviv, and patches and analysis by Jan and Tom
  Paton, issue 334 and 467).
- Fix problem with unaligned ticks and hover/click events caused by
  padding on the placeholder by hardcoding the placeholder padding to
  0 (reported by adityadineshsaxena, Matt Sommer, Daniel Atos and some
  other people, issue 301).
- Update colorhelpers plugin to avoid dying when trying to parse an
  invalid string (reported by cadavor, issue 483).


Flot 0.6
--------

API changes:

1. Selection support has been moved to a plugin. Thus if you're
passing selection: { mode: something }, you MUST include the file
jquery.flot.selection.js after jquery.flot.js. This reduces the size
of base Flot and makes it easier to customize the selection as well as
improving code clarity. The change is based on a patch from andershol.

2. In the global options specified in the $.plot command,
"lines", "points", "bars" and "shadowSize" have been moved to a
sub-object called "series", i.e.

  $.plot(placeholder, data, { lines: { show: true }})

should be changed to

  $.plot(placeholder, data, { series: { lines: { show: true }}})

All future series-specific options will go into this sub-object to
simplify plugin writing. Backward-compatibility code is in place, so
old code should not break.

3. "plothover" no longer provides the original data point, but instead
a normalized one, since there may be no corresponding original point.

4. Due to a bug in previous versions of jQuery, you now need at least
jQuery 1.2.6. But if you can, try jQuery 1.3.2 as it got some
improvements in event handling speed.


Changes:

- Added support for disabling interactivity for specific data series
  (request from Ronald Schouten and Steve Upton).

- Flot now calls $() on the placeholder and optional legend container
  passed in so you can specify DOM elements or CSS expressions to make
  it easier to use Flot with libraries like Prototype or Mootools or
  through raw JSON from Ajax responses.

- A new "plotselecting" event is now emitted while the user is making
  a selection.

- The "plothover" event is now emitted immediately instead of at most
  10 times per second, you'll have to put in a setTimeout yourself if
  you're doing something really expensive on this event.

- The built-in date formatter can now be accessed as
  $.plot.formatDate(...) (suggestion by Matt Manela) and even
  replaced.

- Added "borderColor" option to the grid (patch from Amaury Chamayou
  and patch from Mike R. Williamson).

- Added support for gradient backgrounds for the grid, take a look at
  the "setting options" example (based on patch from Amaury Chamayou,
  issue 90).

- Gradient bars (suggestion by stefpet).
  
- Added a "plotunselected" event which is triggered when the selection
  is removed, see "selection" example (suggestion by Meda Ugo);

- The option legend.margin can now specify horizontal and vertical
  margins independently (suggestion by someone who's annoyed).

- Data passed into Flot is now copied to a new canonical format to
  enable further processing before it hits the drawing routines. As a
  side-effect, this should make Flot more robust in the face of bad
  data (and fixes issue 112).

- Step-wise charting: line charts have a new option "steps" that when
  set to true connects the points with horizontal/vertical steps
  instead of diagonal lines.

- The legend labelFormatter now passes the series in addition to just
  the label (suggestion by Vincent Lemeltier).

- Horizontal bars (based on patch by Jason LeBrun).

- Support for partial bars by specifying a third coordinate, i.e. they
  don't have to start from the axis. This can be used to make stacked
  bars.

- New option to disable the (grid.show).

- Added pointOffset method for converting a point in data space to an
  offset within the placeholder.
  
- Plugin system: register an init method in the $.flot.plugins array
  to get started, see PLUGINS.txt for details on how to write plugins
  (it's easy). There are also some extra methods to enable access to
  internal state.

- Hooks: you can register functions that are called while Flot is
  crunching the data and doing the plot. This can be used to modify
  Flot without changing the source, useful for writing plugins. Some
  hooks are defined, more are likely to come.
  
- Threshold plugin: you can set a threshold and a color, and the data
  points below that threshold will then get the color. Useful for
  marking data below 0, for instance.

- Stack plugin: you can specify a stack key for each series to have
  them summed. This is useful for drawing additive/cumulative graphs
  with bars and (currently unfilled) lines.

- Crosshairs plugin: trace the mouse position on the axes, enable with
  crosshair: { mode: "x"} (see the new tracking example for a use).

- Image plugin: plot prerendered images.

- Navigation plugin for panning and zooming a plot.

- More configurable grid.

- Axis transformation support, useful for non-linear plots, e.g. log
  axes and compressed time axes (like omitting weekends).

- Support for twelve-hour date formatting (patch by Forrest Aldridge).

- The color parsing code in Flot has been cleaned up and split out so
  it's now available as a separate jQuery plugin. It's included inline
  in the Flot source to make dependency managing easier. This also
  makes it really easy to use the color helpers in Flot plugins.

Bug fixes:

- Fixed two corner-case bugs when drawing filled curves (report and
  analysis by Joshua Varner).
- Fix auto-adjustment code when setting min to 0 for an axis where the
  dataset is completely flat on that axis (report by chovy).
- Fixed a bug with passing in data from getData to setData when the
  secondary axes are used (issue 65, reported by nperelman).
- Fixed so that it is possible to turn lines off when no other chart
  type is shown (based on problem reported by Glenn Vanderburg), and
  fixed so that setting lineWidth to 0 also hides the shadow (based on
  problem reported by Sergio Nunes).
- Updated mousemove position expression to the latest from jQuery (bug
  reported by meyuchas).
- Use CSS borders instead of background in legend (fix printing issue 25
  and 45).
- Explicitly convert axis min/max to numbers.
- Fixed a bug with drawing marking lines with different colors
  (reported by Khurram).
- Fixed a bug with returning y2 values in the selection event (fix
  by exists, issue 75).
- Only set position relative on placeholder if it hasn't already a
  position different from static (reported by kyberneticist, issue 95).
- Don't round markings to prevent sub-pixel problems (reported by Dan
  Lipsitt).
- Make the grid border act similarly to a regular CSS border, i.e.
  prevent it from overlapping the plot itself. This also fixes a
  problem with anti-aliasing when the width is 1 pixel (reported by
  Anthony Ettinger).
- Imported version 3 of excanvas and fixed two issues with the newer
  version. Hopefully, this will make Flot work with IE8 (nudge by
  Fabien Menager, further analysis by Booink, issue 133).
- Changed the shadow code for lines to hopefully look a bit better
  with vertical lines.
- Round tick positions to avoid possible problems with fractions
  (suggestion by Fred, issue 130).
- Made the heuristic for determining how many ticks to aim for a bit
  smarter.
- Fix for uneven axis margins (report and patch by Paul Kienzle) and
  snapping to ticks (concurrent report and patch by lifthrasiir).
- Fixed bug with slicing in findNearbyItems (patch by zollman).
- Make heuristic for x axis label widths more dynamic (patch by
  rickinhethuis).
- Make sure points on top take precedence when finding nearby points
  when hovering (reported by didroe, issue 224).

Flot 0.5
--------

Backwards API change summary: Timestamps are now in UTC. Also
"selected" event -> becomes "plotselected" with new data, the
parameters for setSelection are now different (but backwards
compatibility hooks are in place), coloredAreas becomes markings with
a new interface (but backwards compatibility hooks are in place).


Interactivity: added a new "plothover" event and this and the
"plotclick" event now returns the closest data item (based on patch by
/david, patch by Mark Byers for bar support). See the revamped
"interacting with the data" example for some hints on what you can do.

Highlighting: you can now highlight points and datapoints are
autohighlighted when you hover over them (if hovering is turned on).

Support for dual axis has been added (based on patch by someone who's
annoyed and /david). For each data series you can specify which axes
it belongs to, and there are two more axes, x2axis and y2axis, to
customize. This affects the "selected" event which has been renamed to
"plotselected" and spews out { xaxis: { from: -10, to: 20 } ... },
setSelection in which the parameters are on a new form (backwards
compatible hooks are in place so old code shouldn't break) and
markings (formerly coloredAreas).

Timestamps in time mode are now displayed according to
UTC instead of the time zone of the visitor. This affects the way the
timestamps should be input; you'll probably have to offset the
timestamps according to your local time zone. It also affects any
custom date handling code (which basically now should use the
equivalent UTC date mehods, e.g. .setUTCMonth() instead of
.setMonth().

Added support for specifying the size of tick labels (axis.labelWidth,
axis.labelHeight). Useful for specifying a max label size to keep
multiple plots aligned.

Markings, previously coloredAreas, are now specified as ranges on the
axes, like { xaxis: { from: 0, to: 10 }}. Furthermore with markings
you can now draw horizontal/vertical lines by setting from and to to
the same coordinate (idea from line support patch by by Ryan Funduk).

The "fill" option can now be a number that specifies the opacity of
the fill.

You can now specify a coordinate as null (like [2, null]) and Flot
will take the other coordinate into account when scaling the axes
(based on patch by joebno).

New option for bars "align". Set it to "center" to center the bars on
the value they represent.

setSelection now takes a second parameter which you can use to prevent
the method from firing the "plotselected" handler. 

Using the "container" option in legend now overwrites the container
element instead of just appending to it (fixes infinite legend bug,
reported by several people, fix by Brad Dewey).

Fixed a bug in calculating spacing around the plot (reported by
timothytoe). Fixed a bug in finding max values for all-negative data
sets. Prevent the possibility of eternal looping in tick calculations.
Fixed a bug when borderWidth is set to 0 (reported by
Rob/sanchothefat). Fixed a bug with drawing bars extending below 0
(reported by James Hewitt, patch by Ryan Funduk). Fixed a
bug with line widths of bars (reported by MikeM). Fixed a bug with
'nw' and 'sw' legend positions. Improved the handling of axis
auto-scaling with bars. Fixed a bug with multi-line x-axis tick
labels (reported by Luca Ciano). IE-fix help by Savage Zhang.


Flot 0.4
--------

API changes: deprecated axis.noTicks in favor of just specifying the
number as axis.ticks. So "xaxis: { noTicks: 10 }" becomes
"xaxis: { ticks: 10 }"

Time series support. Specify axis.mode: "time", put in Javascript
timestamps as data, and Flot will automatically spit out sensible
ticks. Take a look at the two new examples. The format can be
customized with axis.timeformat and axis.monthNames, or if that fails
with axis.tickFormatter.

Support for colored background areas via grid.coloredAreas. Specify an
array of { x1, y1, x2, y2 } objects or a function that returns these
given { xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax }.

More members on the plot object (report by Chris Davies and others).
"getData" for inspecting the assigned settings on data series (e.g.
color) and "setData", "setupGrid" and "draw" for updating the contents
without a total replot.

The default number of ticks to aim for is now dependent on the size of
the plot in pixels. Support for customizing tick interval sizes
directly with axis.minTickSize and axis.tickSize.

Cleaned up the automatic axis scaling algorithm and fixed how it
interacts with ticks. Also fixed a couple of tick-related corner case
bugs (one reported by mainstreetmark, another reported by timothytoe).

The option axis.tickFormatter now takes a function with two
parameters, the second parameter is an optional object with
information about the axis. It has min, max, tickDecimals, tickSize.

Added support for segmented lines (based on patch from Michael
MacDonald) and for ignoring null and bad values (suggestion from Nick
Konidaris and joshwaihi). 

Added support for changing the border width (joebno and safoo).
Label colors can be changed via CSS by selecting the tickLabel class.

Fixed a bug in handling single-item bar series (reported by Emil
Filipov). Fixed erratic behaviour when interacting with the plot
with IE 7 (reported by Lau Bech Lauritzen). Prevent IE/Safari text
selection when selecting stuff on the canvas.



Flot 0.3
--------

This is mostly a quick-fix release because jquery.js wasn't included
in the previous zip/tarball.

Support clicking on the plot. Turn it on with grid: { clickable: true },
then you get a "plotclick" event on the graph placeholder with the
position in units of the plot.

Fixed a bug in dealing with data where min = max, thanks to Michael
Messinides.

Include jquery.js in the zip/tarball.


Flot 0.2
--------

Added support for putting a background behind the default legend. The
default is the partly transparent background color. Added
backgroundColor and backgroundOpacity to the legend options to control
this.

The ticks options can now be a callback function that takes one
parameter, an object with the attributes min and max. The function
should return a ticks array.

Added labelFormatter option in legend, useful for turning the legend
labels into links.

Fixed a couple of bugs.

The API should now be fully documented.

Patch from Guy Fraser to make parts of the code smaller.

API changes: Moved labelMargin option to grid from x/yaxis.


Flot 0.1
--------

First public release.