I'm working on replacing a dynamic chart implemented in highcharts. The current implementation is a line-area chart that expands over time with incoming streaming data, so the replacement needs to be dynamically alterable, and preferrably animated.
Currently I'm looking at D3 for the replacement. There are a few examples I've found which show that there may be something similar which is possible, such as the charts for streaming data found here, but in this example the line is redrawn at every iteration. It's not terribly inefficient as the visualization is limited to a fixed window of data, but in my case a high volume of data needs to be displayed from start to finish as the data streams in. Redrawing the chart at every addition will likely result in rapid performance loss.
In D3, is there a method of adding a single segment to an existing plot that does not require a redraw?
I ended up abandoning D3 as it required too much development to make it as presentable as an interactive chart that was ready out-of-the-box, but I did figure out how to do what I was thinking.
Instead of re-adding a new line with additional points at every iteration, I ended up using a path component which allows additional points to be added progressively. The path does have to be re-rendered and generates a short svg path string, so I'm not exactly sure which method is more efficient, but a short path string reduces complexity of the resulting html in the case that one were to add multiple lines to the plot, one for each segment.
If an addition to the path involves only the generation of a new string using concatenation of the original then I imagine this could be much more efficient than iterating through an array of series data that grows at every update.
The result was fast enough to keep up with streaming data without any visible slowing of the UI, but it was just unfortunate that I needed something a little more developed.