Sparkline Some Interest With Ruby on Rails

Recently, I added some sparkline graphs to a Ruby on Rails application. A sparkline is a very small graphic that displays a large amount of information, typically shown over time, and usually embedded in some other text. Invented by the father of modern infographics Edward Tufte, the sparkline has become a fixture of many online applications that want to visually display some stats in a simple, integrated way.

When it come to adding sparklines into a Ruby on Rails application, there are a couple of different options. You can chart the data on the server, output being an image file. You can also chart the data on the client, with a couple of different JavaScript libraries as available options.

I started my plan, intending to implement my charts on the client-side. The project that appears to have the most flexibility, speed, and options, is an amazing jQuery plugin called jQuery Sparkline. Unfortunately, the project to which I needed to add the sparklines is a bit older, and does not use jQuery. As a result, I was not able to use jQuery Sparkline for this current project.

Another interesting JavaScript sparkline library is lethain's Sparkline.js, but it has not been updated in some time, and is not compatible with current Internet Explorer versions. There is also an interesting looking newer lib topfunky-sparkline-js but I have not tried it out yet.

So that brings us to server-side sparkline generation. If you are using ImageMagick/RMagick then @topfunky once again provides, with the Ruby sparklines gem. This gem provides lots of options for doing all sorts of fancy sparklines.

In my case, I am not using ImageMagick for anything else, so I did not want to install it just for this. What I really wanted was something much lighter-weight, and I was willing to accept a lot fewer options to get it.

It turns out that madrobby has written a library for generating very simple sparklines in pure Ruby code, called spark_pr. The project uses _why's pure Ruby implementation of a PNG generator to do the low-level work.

spark_pr has also spawned an interesting application of it from @technoweenie called Sparkplug, which is a Rack module that generates spaklines from CSV data on the fly, using Rack handlers and Rack caching.

Once I had seen Sparkplug's minimal elegance, it seemed spark_pr was the option for me. I decided to incorporate spark_pr into my application. Given that the app was written with a dedicated approach to keeping a clean RESTful interface, and that the database already contained the time-series data, it was quite easy to incorporate. Here is what I had to do:

Step 1: Put spark_pr.rb file into lib directory. I just grabbed the code from the repo, and dropped it into my project. You may decide to have a more sophisticated way to do it, such as using git submodules.

Step 2:

require "spark_pr"

in your controller

Step 3:

include Spark

in your controller

Step 4: Add PNG format to controller action that was already returning my time-series data, and return the sparkline PNG data:

Note that this controller action is already returning XML or JSON. PNG is just another format to be added, if you have a well-designed RESTful controller action.

Step 5: Put image_tag that requests the sparkline PNG image file into the view where you want it to appear, like this one:


Voila! Refresh that view and you should now be looking at your ultra-hipster-chic sparkline graph. It is surprising how much more information comprehension a person has, when they are seeing a visual representation of their data. Plus it looks cool.