After a long battle with the WebBrowser component (pyRevit output window) to get it to behave like a normal html renderer, I managed to figure out how to incorporate a javascript charts library into the output window. For this purpose I selected the Charts.js library for its simplicity and ease of use.

Charts.js currently allows for 6 to 7 different chart styles. All the charts are interactive and the user can turn on and off the chart labels or hover over the data points to see the actual values.

These images are from pyRevit output. Run the pyRevit > Labs > Test Charts tool and see it for yourself.

Creating Graphs in pyRevit

This is an experimental feature and the API is subject to change so don’t deploy it at full scale yet. To get you started playing with charts, here is how you can currently use them…

Step 1: Create a chart object for the chart type that you want. We’ll add data to this later…

from scriptutils import this_script

# Line chart
chart = this_script.output.make_line_chart()
# Bar chart
chart = this_script.output.make_bar_chart()
# Bubble chart
chart = this_script.output.make_bubble_chart()
# Radar chart
chart = this_script.output.make_radar_chart()
# Polar chart
chart = this_script.output.make_polar_chart()
# Pie chart
chart = this_script.output.make_pie_chart()
# Doughnut chart
chart = this_script.output.make_doughnut_chart()

Step 1-a: Optional: Setup the chart title, and other options. the full list of options for every chart is available on Charts.js Documentation page. Some of the properties have their own sub-properties, for example the title option for the charts has multiple sub-properties as shown below. The value for these type of properties should be a dictionary of the sub-properties you’d like to set. All this is explained clearly in the Charts.js Documentation

chart.set_style('height:150px')

chart.options.title = {'display': True,
                       'text':'Chart Title',
                       'fontSize': 18,
                       'fontColor': '#000',
                       'fontStyle': 'bold'}

Step 2: Now let’s add data to the chart. Every chart object has a data property chart.data that we can interact with to add datasets to the chart. Different types of charts need different types of data sets in terms of how data is organized, so the chart can present multiple data sets correctly. I’m providing two examples here, one for a simple line chart (showing 3 different data sets) and another for a radial chart (also showing 3 different data sets within the same chart). They’re all very similar to each other though.

Line chart example: See the comments in the script for more info

# this is a list of labels for the X axis of the line graph
chart.data.labels = ['Monday', 'Tuesday',
                     'Wednesday', 'Thursday',
                     'Friday', 'Saturday', 'Sunday']

# Let's add the first dataset to the chart object
# we'll give it a name: set_a
set_a = chart.data.new_dataset('set_a')
# And let's add data to it.
# These are the data for the Y axis of the graph
# The data length should match the length of data for the X axis
set_a.data = [12, 19, 3, 17, 6, 3, 7]
# Set the color for this graph
set_a.set_color(0xFF, 0x8C, 0x8D, 0.8)
# You can also set custom options for this graph
# See the Charts.js documentation for all the options
set_b.fill = False

# Same as above for a new data set: set_b
set_b = chart.data.new_dataset('set_b')
# Obviously a different set of data and a different color
set_b.data = [2, 29, 5, 5, 2, 3, 10]
set_b.set_color(0xFF, 0xCE, 0x56, 0.8)

# Same as above for a new data set: set_c
set_c = chart.data.new_dataset('set_c')
# Obviously a different set of data and a different colorset_c.data = [55, 12, 2, 20, 18, 6, 22]
set_c.set_color(0x36, 0xA2, 0xEB, 0.8)

And here is the result:

Pie chart example: See the comments in the script for more info

Set the labels for the circumference axis
chart.data.labels = ['A', 'B', 'C']

# Create new data sets
set_a = chart.data.new_dataset('set_a')
set_a.data = [100, 20, 50]
# You can set a different color for each pie of the chart
set_a.backgroundColor = ["#560764", "#1F6CB0", "#F98B60"]

set_b = chart.data.new_dataset('set_b')
set_b.data = [50, 30, 80]
set_b.backgroundColor = ["#913175", "#70A3C4", "#FFC057"]

set_c = chart.data.new_dataset('set_c')
set_c.data = [40, 20, 10]
set_c.backgroundColor = ["#DD5B82", "#E7E8F5", "#FFE084"]

You can apply these data sets for radar, pie, polar, and doughnut (since they’re all radial) charts and get different results: