SvelteVis

A Svelte component library for composing responsive interactive data visualisations.

https://github.com/olihawkins/sveltevis

Status

This package is in active but early development. The API should be regarded as unstable until version 1.0.0. The project is targetting Svelte 5 and uses runes.

Roadmap

The goal of the project is to provide a Svelte component library that allows you to quickly compose a responsive interactive visualisation from a set of components and a JSON object that specifies their behaviour. The components include standard chart elements like axes and gridlines, along with geometries that map input data to a specfific visual representation (e.g. points, lines, bars, areas). The library is extensible, so if you want to implement a new kind of visualisation you only need to implement a new geometry for the kind of data represention you want to create. All of the infrastructure for handling responsiveness and interactivity is available via the parent Visualisation component's shared context.

The project currently contains the components needed to make responsive scatterplots and line charts. It also includes a system for sending messages between components about events, which is used to implement a Popup component.

Components completed

• Visualisation
• Header
• Footer
• Graphic
• Svg
• Gridlines
• AxisX
• AxisY
• Plot
• CircleGeometry
• LineGeometry
• Popup
• ColorSchemeObserver

Next steps

The priorities for future work are:

• Create more geometry components
• Develop an approach to animation

Trying the components

If you want to try the existing components, the easiest way right now is to download and run the demo project.

1. Clone the project repository from GitHub

2. Run npm install --force to install the dependencies (the force argument is needed because the project uses Svelte 5, which is in beta)

3. Run npm run dev to start the demo application on localhost:5173

It is also possible to install the package from NPM into a Vite Svelte template, but this requires modifying the template to run Svelte 5.

1. Create a Svelte project with Vite using npm create vite@latest my-svelte-project -- --template svelte

2. Run npm install to install the dependencies

3. Update Svelte to version 5 with npm i svelte@next

4. Install the package with npm install sveltevis

Note that you will need to edit main.js in the Vite project to replace the old method of instantiating the app with the new method.

// Add import for createRoot function
import { createRoot } from 'svelte';

// Comment out old method of instantiation
// const app = new App({
//   target: document.getElementById('app'),
// })

// Add new method
const app = createRoot(App, { target: document.getElementById("app") });

Styling components

SvelteVis allows you to target the styles used in its components using your own stylesheet, so that the styles of your visualisations match your website. Importing SvelteVis components into a new project doesn't automatically add the default styles used in the demo application. However, if you want to use these stylesheets as a starting point for making modifications, they can be found in the css folder: simply copy them as stylesheets to use in your own app.

The stylesheet for targeting SvelteVis components is called sveltevis.css and this is the stylesheet you should modify to implement your own visualisation styles. The site.css stylesheet is the css used for the demo application, and it doesn't contain any of the selectors used to target the visualisation components. Both of these default stylesheets are set up to provide alternate light and dark styles based on the operating system mode.