Persistent Formatting for Interactive Chart Elements
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Solution Overview
Problem
Interactive charts often lose user-requested formatting changes during alterations, navigations, and data refreshes, leading to user frustration and reduced efficiency.
Innovation Solution
The solution involves persisting user-requested visual alterations by directly associating and storing information for rendering format changes on the data and index rule for interactive chart elements, ensuring that stylistic, elemental, and layout formatting remain consistent across chart navigations and data refreshes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If interactive chart allows frequent alterations and navigations, then chart flexibility and interactivity are improved, but user formatting changes are lost requiring repeated adjustments
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-applies user-requested formatting changes to chart elements before navigations or data refreshes occur. When a user modifies formatting, the system stores these formatting instructions and automatically applies them to the relevant chart elements (such as data series, axes, or legends) before any navigation or refresh operation, ensuring formatting is preserved without requiring user re-adjustment.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements a feedback mechanism where user formatting changes are captured, stored, and automatically reapplied after navigations or data refreshes. The system monitors when users make formatting adjustments, maintains a record of these changes, and automatically restores them after chart operations, creating a closed-loop system that prevents formatting loss.
2Reliability
If interactive chart enables multiple data refreshes, then data currency is improved, but user formatting alterations are lost
Solution Approach 1:
Before executing a data refresh operation, the system pre-applies stored user formatting changes to ensure they are preserved. The formatting instructions are maintained in a separate data structure that is independent of the data refresh process, allowing the system to refresh underlying data while automatically restoring user-customized formatting afterward.
Solution Approach 2:
The system introduces an intermediary formatting layer that separates user formatting preferences from the underlying data structure. This intermediary layer acts as a buffer that protects formatting information during data refresh operations, allowing data to be updated while formatting instructions are preserved and reapplied without interference from the refresh process.
3Adaptability or versatility
If interactive chart provides extensive navigation options, then analysis capability is improved, but formatting consistency deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-applies user formatting changes before navigation operations such as drilling down, expanding, or collapsing chart elements. When a user requests navigation, the system first ensures that formatting instructions are applied to the current view, then executes the navigation, and finally reapplies the same formatting to the new view, maintaining consistency across different levels of chart detail.
Data Source
AI summary
User requested format alterations to interactive chart elements, including, but not limited to, legends, axes, gridlines, data labels, axes labels, error bars, and datapoints, whether they be represented as points, bars, pie wedges, etc., are persisted in spite of chart navigations, underlying data changes and/or format alterations. Interactive chart element format persistence is maintained by the association and storing of data identifying a format change on the data and index rule for the respective chart element.