Maximum bar thickness

[punit-shah]

I noticed that v2.2.0-rc.2 introduced a barThickness option to set the thickness of a bar to a fixed width.

I sometimes deal with charts with perhaps two or three bars. Chart.js's calculated bar widths would fill the whole chart area, resulting in very wide bars. I thought barThickness would be the perfect solution for this!

However, in practice I found it is not ideal. Setting the bar thickness to a fixed value means the bar will always stay at that width, which isn't what we want if we want our charts to be responsive.

A barThickness that looks great on a big screen would cause the bars to overlap on small screens.

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/AXdvEr This chart for example looks great with a barThickness of 100 at a viewport width of 1008px, but resize the screen to 600px wide and the bars are overlapping.

My solution is a maxBarThickness option instead. Chart.js would use its normal calculated bar thickness, unless it is greater than the maxBarThickness value, in which case it would use the maxBarThickness.

return calculatedBarThickness > maxBarThickness ? maxBarThickness : calculatedBarThickness;

[etimberg]

@Joshuabaker2 added the barThickness option. What are your thoughts on this?

[Joshuabaker2]

You are correct it does cause overlap on small screens (or if there are simply enough data points on even a very large screen). I would tend to agree with @punit-shah that it is likely that most people would find maxBarThickness a good compromise.

I'm not certain that the proposed solution would necessarily be the best bet however, as I imagine most people would rather that their bars only begin to shrink when the bars are essentially touching eachother, whereas with that solution it is possible that they would begin shrinking too early (because the default bar thickness also maintains spacing).

In order to support maxBarThickness so that the bars maintain that thickness as long as possible, a possible solution would be to keep track of when the bars would begin to touch eachother, and then calculate a new thickness so that they don't begin to overlap. Thoughts?

[orber3]

hey
i am looking for away to set minimum thickness of a bar.
any thoughts on how to do that ?