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jQuery Sparklines

About

15 June 2013
Version 2.1.2 Released
Adds jQuery 1.10.0 support

This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript.

The plugin is compatible with most modern browsers and has been tested with Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10 as well as iOS and Android.

Each example displayed below takes just 1 line of HTML or javascript to generate.

The plugin was written by Gareth Watts for Splunk Inc and released under the New BSD License.

Examples

Pie charts 1,1,2 1,5 20,50,80

Bullet charts
10,12,12,9,7
14,12,12,9,7
10,12,14,9,7

Try It Out

Loading..

  • Chart type:

Mouse speed Loading..

Inline 10,8,9,3,5,8,5 line graphs 8,4,0,0,0,0,1,4,4,10,10,10,10,0,0,0,4,6,5,9,10

Bar charts 10,8,9,3,5,8,5 negative values: -3,1,2,0,3,-1 stacked: 0:2,2:4,4:2,4:1

Composite inline 8,4,0,0,0,0,1,4,4,10,10,10,10,0,0,0,4,6,5,9,10

Inline with normal range 8,4,0,0,0,0,1,4,4,10,10,10,10,0,0,0,4,6,5,9,10

Composite bar 4,6,7,7,4,3,2,1,4

Discrete 4,6,7,7,4,3,2,1,4,4,5,6,7,6,6,2,4,5
Discrete with threshold 4,6,7,7,4,3,2,1,4

Customize size and colours 10,8,9,3,5,8,5,7

Tristate charts 1,1,0,1,-1,-1,1,-1,0,0,1,1
(think games won, lost or drawn)

Tristate chart using a colour map: 1,2,0,2,-1,-2,1,-2,0,0,1,1

Box Plot: 4,27,34,52,54,59,61,68,78,82,85,87,91,93,100
Pre-computed box plot Loading..

News

15 June 2013 - Version 2.1.2 Relased
This release adds support for jQuery 1.10.0 and other bug fixes and minor improvements.

See the full changelog for details of all changes.

26 January 2013 - Version 2.1.1 Relased
This release adds support for jQuery 1.9.0 along with a couple of other bug fixes.

If you're using a version of jQuery later than 1.8, be extra sure you're not rendering your page in quirks mode to avoid breaking tooltips for IE users. See jQuery's notes on quirks compatiblity for more info.

See the full changelog for details of all changes.

15 October 2012 - Version 2.1 Released
This release is primarily a bug-fix release, but also adds support for Internet Explorer 10.

See the full changelog for details of all changes.

29 April 2012 - Version 2.0 Released
This release represents a significant code update. It features:

It should be fully backwards compatible with the 1.x versions with the following exceptions:

There's a few non-code updates as well:

Also check out Splunk 4.3 - This project was originally written for that product and it finally shipped with it ;-) Now you can have sparklines in your Splunk dashboards.

30 November 2010 - Version 1.6 Released
This release primarily makes it easier to work with the sparklines if your environment requires you to pass options such as colours, etc. on the tags themselves, rather than feeding them to the sparkline function. It also allows for values to passed as an attribute on the tag, as well as a comment inside the tag. This avoids the values being displayed on screen briefly before the sparkline function has a chance to execute.

eg. 

<span class="sparkline" sparkType="bar" sparkBarColor="green"><!-- 1,2,3,4 --></span>

$('.sparkline').sparkline('html', { enableTagOptions: true });

This release also:

See the changelog for the complete list of changes.

1 March 2010 - Version 1.5.1 Released
I accidentally left a stray comma in the 1.5 release which breaks compatibility with Internet Explorer. This version contains only a fix for that bug.

26 February 2010 - Version 1.5 Released
This version contains a number of minor updates and fixes, including:

See the changelog for the complete list of changes.

14 September 2009 - Version 1.4.3 Released
This version adds support for null values for line and bar charts, updates the default pie chart colours, adds the colorMap option for bar charts and adds a lineWidth option for line charts. - See the changelog for full details.

Over 3,000 people have bookmarked this site on delicious now! Only 7 votes on the jQuery plugins site though; maybe you could help with that ;-)

25 April 2009 - Version 1.4.2 Released
This release just fixes the drawing of circular spots on line charts for Internet Explorer 8.

27 March 2009 - Version 1.4.1 Released
This is a bug fix release - It addresses an off-by-one-pixel error when rendering sparklines in Internet Explorer. It also addresses some issues with sparklines not being rendered in some situations with jQuery 1.3 and higher.

25 February 2009 - Version 1.4 Released
This version adds box plots 4,27,34,52,54,59,61,68,78,82,85,87,91,93,100 suggested by Daniel Kadosh. What's a box plot?.

This release also includes a few bug fixes including one where lines would not always appear crisp in canvas based browsers such as Firefox.

Also at this time IE8 RC1 is out.. It looks like sparklines work fairly well in this release, although the small circles used in line charts, box plots, etc. don't show up.

25 January 2009 - Version 1.3 Released
This version fixes some positioning issues on all platforms and adds some support for Internet Explorer 8. IE 8 beta 2 (the latest beta release) seems to have some VML bugs though that I haven't been able to work around yet, so the results aren't perfect.

This version also adds a new function called $.sparkline_display_visible() - Call this anytime sparklines that were drawn into a non-displayed element may have just become visible so that they will be correctly rendered. For example, this site uses the function to make sure sparklines displayed in the various tabbed pages are drawn when the tab is selected.

Finally I updated the site and docs somewhat as the old layout was looking a little cramped.

21 November 2008 - Version 1.2.1 Released
Fixes a couple of pie chart bugs; no new features.

19 November 2008 - Version 1.2 Released
Some important bug fixes amongst some basic new features:

See the changelog for the complete list of changes.

14 August 2008 - Using Sparklines with Splunk
I gave a quick 5 minute demo at the Splunk Developers Boot Camp on using the Splunk PHP SDK with jquery.sparkline.js to chart the traffic this page received within the first few days of its launch.

Check out the short write up i posted to the new Splunk Wiki for the code and data I used to make it work (it was really easy) and if you download your own free copy of Splunk you can try it yourself ;-)

29 July 2008 - Version 1.1 Released
Thanks for the suggestions for improvements - This version fixes several bugs and adds some more features and chart types including

See the changelog for the complete list of changes.

17 July 2008 - Version 1.0 Released
Initial version released

Documentation

Quick Start

To add some sparklines to your web page you need four things:

  1. The jQuery javascript library loaded into the page - At least version 1.4.3 or higher
  2. A copy of jquery.sparkline.js loaded into the page which you can download from this site
  3. An inline tag on the page within which to display the sparkline (eg. <span>)
  4. A call to the sparkline() function to actually display the sparkline.

Additionally rendering the page in standards mode (see the DOCTYPE declaration in the example below) maximizes compatibilty with Internet Explorer.

Here's a simple web page that will display some sparklines: 

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" 
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<head>

    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.7.2.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.sparkline.js"></script>

    <script type="text/javascript">
    $(function() {
        /** This code runs when everything has been loaded on the page */
        /* Inline sparklines take their values from the contents of the tag */
        $('.inlinesparkline').sparkline(); 

        /* Sparklines can also take their values from the first argument 
        passed to the sparkline() function */
        var myvalues = [10,8,5,7,4,4,1];
        $('.dynamicsparkline').sparkline(myvalues);

        /* The second argument gives options such as chart type */
        $('.dynamicbar').sparkline(myvalues, {type: 'bar', barColor: 'green'} );

        /* Use 'html' instead of an array of values to pass options 
        to a sparkline with data in the tag */
        $('.inlinebar').sparkline('html', {type: 'bar', barColor: 'red'} );
    });
    </script>
</head>
<body>

<p>
Inline Sparkline: <span class="inlinesparkline">1,4,4,7,5,9,10</span>.
</p>
<p>
Sparkline with dynamic data: <span class="dynamicsparkline">Loading..</span>
</p>
<p>
Bar chart with dynamic data: <span class="dynamicbar">Loading..</span>
</p>
<p>
Bar chart with inline data: <span class="inlinebar">1,3,4,5,3,5</span>
</p>


</body>
</html>

Click here to open this example in a new window.

As the example shows, the values to be used in a sparkline can either be supplied inline, inside the tag to be used as the target or can be passed as the first parameter to the sparkline() function.

To draw different types of charts, or overlay one on top of another, or display charts into hidden layers, read on.

Syntax

$(selector).sparkline(values, options);

Values can either be an array of numbers or "html" which causes the values to be read from from the selected tag: 

<span class="sparklines">1,2,3,4,5,4,3,2,1</span>
<span id="ticker"">Loading..</span>

<script type="text/javascript">
$('.sparklines').sparkline('html');
$('#ticker').sparkline([1,2,3,4,5,4,3,2,1]);
</script>

Values supplied in the tag can also appear inside a comment, or as an attribute of the tag itself: 

<span class="sparklines"><!-- 1,2,3,4,5,4,3,2,1 --></span>
<span class="sparklines" values="1,2,3,4,5,4,3,2,1"></span>

By default the plugin will look for an attribute called "values" on the tag to find values to render, but you can change this by setting the tagValuesAttribute option. This can be useful if you want to create a composite graph as you can use different names for the values attribute for each graph.

Options is an object that specifies the type of sparkline to draw, colours to use, etc. 

$('#barchart').sparkline(myvalues, { type:'bar', barColor:'green' });

If necessary, options can be passed as attributes on each tag. This requires setting the enableTagOptions option when calling the sparklines() function and reduces performance somewhat (more critical on IE6) 

<span class="sparklines" sparkType="bar" sparkBarColor="green"><!-- 1,2,3,4,3,2,1 --></span>
<span class="sparklines" sparkType="bar" sparkBarColor="red"><!-- 1,2,3,4,3,2,1 --></span>

<script type="text/javascript">
$('.sparklines').sparkline('html', { enableTagOptions: true });
</script>

Each option must be prefixed with "spark", though this can be changed by passing a tagOptionPrefix option to the sparkline() function

You can also override the default options for all subsequent sparklines by assigning values to $.fn.sparkline.defaults

Eg. to change the default line color as listed in the common options below, you can do: 

$.fn.sparkline.defaults.common.lineColor = 'red';

Replace 'common' with 'line', 'bar', 'tristate', 'discrete', 'bullet', 'pie' or 'box' to set options specific to those chart types.

Common Options

These options can be set for most of the supported chart types.

type One of 'line' (default), 'bar', 'tristate', 'discrete', 'bullet', 'pie' or 'box'
width Width of the chart - Defaults to 'auto' - May be any valid css width - 1.5em, 20px, etc (using a number without a unit specifier won't do what you want) - This option does nothing for bar and tristate chars (see barWidth)
height Height of the chart - Defaults to 'auto' (line height of the containing tag)
lineColor Used by line and discrete charts to specify the colour of the line drawn as a CSS values string
fillColor Specify the colour used to fill the area under the graph as a CSS value. Set to false to disable fill
chartRangeMin Specify the minimum value to use for the range of Y values of the chart - Defaults to the minimum value supplied
chartRangeMax Specify the maximum value to use for the range of Y values of the chart - Defaults to the maximum value supplied
composite If true then don't erase any existing chart attached to the tag, but draw another chart over the top - Note that width and height are ignored if an existing chart is detected.
Note: You'll usually want to lock the axis on both charts using chartRangeMin and chartRangeMax if you want the same value on each chart to occupy the same point.
enableTagOptions If true then options can be specified as attributes on each tag to be transformed into a sparkline, as well as passed to the sparkline() function. See also tagOptionPrefix
tagOptionPrefix String that each option passed as an attribute on a tag must begin with. Defaults to 'spark'
tagValuesAttribute The name of the tag attribute to fetch values from, if present - Defaults to 'values'
disableHiddenCheck Set to true to disable checking for hidden sparklines. This can be beneficial if you know you'll never attempt to draw a sparkline into a hidden parent element as it avoids a browser reflow for the test, increasing rendering performance.
Defaults to false - New in 2.0

Range Maps

Several parameters, such as colorMap and tooltipLookupValues accept a range map as a paramter. As the name suggest, it maps ranges of numbers to values. For example: 

    var range_map = $.range_map({
        1: 'red',
        '2:9': 'yellow',
        '10:': 'red'
    })

This would map 1 to red, values of 2 through 9 (inclusive) to yellow and values of 10 and higher to 'red'

Hidden Sparklines

If you try to display a sparkline in a tag that's currently not visible (ie. the tag or one of its parents are set to display:none) then you'll find that the sparkline hasn't been rendered when you finally do make the tag visible. This is because a tag with display:none has no size, and thus a canvas can't be created and sized for the sparkline to be rendered to.

The solution is to call the $.sparkline_display_visible() function anytime a sparkline may have become visible so that it can be correctly rendered. This is the technique this site uses to handle the sparklines that are hidden in the different tabbed sections; the site calls the routine in the tab-changed callback.

Note that as of version 2.0, support for hidden sparklines can be disabled by supplying the disabledHiddenCheck option. This can result in a performance increase in some cases.

Line Charts

8,4,0,0,0,0,1,4,4,10,10,10,10,0,0,0,4,6,5,9,10

Line charts are the default chart type, but to specify the type explicitly set an option called "type" to "line".

defaultPixelsPerValue Defaults to 3 pixels of width for each value in the chart
spotColor The CSS colour of the final value marker. Set to false or an empty string to hide it
minSpotColor The CSS colour of the marker displayed for the mimum value. Set to false or an empty string to hide it
maxSpotColor The CSS colour of the marker displayed for the maximum value. Set to false or an empty string to hide it
spotRadius Radius of all spot markers, In pixels (default: 1.5) - Integer
valueSpots Specifies which points to draw spots on, and with which colour. Accepts a range. For example, to render green spots on all values less than 50 and red on values higher use {':49': 'green, '50:': 'red'}
- New in 2.0
highlightSpotColor Specifies a colour for the spot that appears on a value when moused over. Set to null to disable.
Defaults to #f5f - New in 2.0
highlightLineColor Specifies a colour for the vertical line that appears through a value when moused over. Set to null to disable.
Defaults to #f22 - New in 2.0
lineWidth In pixels (default: 1) - Integer
normalRangeMin, normalRangeMax Specify threshold values between which to draw a bar to denote the "normal" or expected range of values. For example the green bar here 80,85,84,88,98,114,116,104,95,85,84 might denote a normal operating temperature range
drawNormalOnTop By default the normal range is drawn behind the fill area of the chart. Setting this option to true causes it to be drawn over the top of the fill area
xvalues See below
chartRangeClip If true then the y values supplied to plot will be clipped to fall between chartRangeMin and chartRangeMax - By default chartRangeMin/Max just ensure that the chart spans at least that range of values, but does not constrain it
chartRangeMinX Specifies the minimum value to use for the X value of the chart
chartRangeMaxX Specifies the maximum value to use for the X value of the chart

See also all of the common options above, that can also be used with line charts

By default the values supplied to line charts are presumed to be y values mapping on to sequential (integer) x values. If you need to specify both the x and y values for your chart, you have a few options:

  1. Inline: x and y values are separated by a colon: x:y,x:y,x:y - eg. <span class="linechart">1:3,2.7:4,4.8:3</span>
  2. Array of arrays: An array of [x,y] arrays: $('#linechart').sparkline([ [1,3], [2.7,4], [4.8,3] ]);
  3. Separate arrays: Pass x values separately: $('#linechart').sparkline([3,4,3], { xvalues: [1,2.7,4.8]});

You can also specify a value of "null" to omit values from the chart completely. eg:
<span class="linechart">1,2,3,null,3,4,2</span> becomes:
1,2,3,null,3,4,2

Bar Charts

10,8,9,3,5,8,5

-3,1,2,0,3,-1

1,3,4,null,3,2,4 0:2,2:4,4:2,4:1

Set the "type" option to "bar" to generate bar charts. Values can be omitted by using the "null" value instead of a number.

barColor CSS colour used for postive values
negBarColor CSS colour used for negative values
zeroColor CSS colour used for values equal to zero
nullColor CSS colour used for values equal to null - By default null values are omitted entirely, but setting this adds a thin marker for the entry - This can be useful if your chart is pretty sparse; perhaps try setting it to a light grey or something equally unobtrusive
barWidth Width of each bar, in pixels (integer)
barSpacing Space between each bar, in pixels (integer)
zeroAxis Centers the y-axis at zero if true (default)
colorMap A range map to map specific values to selected colours. For example if you want all values of -2 to appear yellow, use colorMap: { '-2': '#ff0' }.
As of version 1.5 you may also pass an array of values here instead of a mapping to specifiy a color for each individual bar. For example if your chart has three values 1,3,1 you can set colorMap=["red", "green", "blue"]
As of version 2.0, objects will be automatically be converted to range maps so you can specify colours for a range of values
stackedBarColor An array of colours to use for stacked bar charts. The first series will use the first value in the array, the second series will use the second, etc. New in 2.0

See also all of the common options above, that can also be used with bar charts

Version 2.0 adds support for stacked bar charts. Values for each data series in the chart can be separated by colons if passed by html, or as an array of arrays.

For example, to draw series one with values of 1,2,3,4 and series 2 with values of 4,3,2,1: 

    <span class="bar">1:4,2:3,3:2,4:1</span>

    // same result as the html data above
    $('.bar').sparkline([ [1,4], [2, 3], [3, 2], [4, 1] ], { type: 'bar' });

Tristate Charts

1,1,0,1,-1,-1,1,-1,0,0,1,1

Tri-state charts are useful to show win-lose-draw information, such as the SF Giants recent game results at the top of the page. You can also use the colorMap option to use different colours for different values, or for arbitrary positions in the chart.

Set the "type" option to "tristate" to generate tristate charts.

posBarColor CSS colour for positive (win) values
negBarColor CSS colour for negative (lose) values
zeroBarColor CSS colour for zero (draw) values
barWidth Width of each bar, in pixels (integer)
barSpacing Space between each bar, in pixels (integer)
colorMap A range map to map specific values to selected colours. For example if you want all values of -2 to appear yellow, use colorMap: { '-2': '#ff0' }.
As of version 1.5 you may also pass an array of values here instead of a mapping to specifiy a color for each individual bar. For example if your chart has three values 1,3,1 you can set colorMap=["red", "green", "blue"]
As of version 2.0, objects will be automatically be converted to range maps so you can specify colours for a range of values.

See also all of the common options above, that can also be used with tristate charts

Discrete Charts

4,6,7,7,4,3,2,1,4,4,5,6,7,6,6,2,4,5

Discrete charts provide a separated thin vertical line for each value.

Set the "type" option to "discrete" to generate discrete charts.

lineHeight Height of each line in pixels - Defaults to 30% of the graph height
thresholdValue Values less than this value will be drawn using thresholdColor instead of lineColor
thresholdColor Colour to use in combination with thresholdValue

See also all of the common options above, that can also be used with discrete charts

Bullet Graphs

10,12,12,9,7

See the wikipedia page for more information on Bullet graphs.
Supplied values must be in this order: target, performance, range1, range2, range3, ...

Set the "type" option to "bullet" to generate bullet graphs.

targetColor The CSS colour of the vertical target marker
targetWidth The width of the target marker in pixels (integer)
performanceColor The CSS color of the performance measure horizontal bar
rangeColors Colors to use for each qualitative range background color - This must be a javascript array. eg ['red','green', '#22f']

See also all of the common options above, that can also be used with bullet charts

Pie Charts

1,1,2
1,5
20,50,80

Set the "type" option to "pie" to generate pie charts.

These little pie charts tend only to be useful with 2 or 3 values at most

sliceColors An array of CSS colors to use for pie slices
offset Angle in degrees to offset the first slice - Try -90 or +90
borderWidth Width of the border to draw around the whole pie chart, in pixels.
Defaults to 0 (no border) - New in 2.0
borderColor CSS color to use to draw the pie border.
Defaults to #000 - New in 2.0

See also all of the common options above, that can also be used with pie charts

Box Plots

4,27,34,52,54,59,61,68,78,82,85,87,91,93,100
Loading..

See the wikipedia page for more information on Box plots

Set the "type" option to "box" to generate box plots.

raw If set to false (default) then the values supplied are used to caculate the box data points for you. If true then you must pre-calculate the points (see below)
showOutliers If true (default) then outliers (values > 1.5x the IQR) are marked with circles and the whiskers are placed at Q1 and Q3 instead of the least and greatest value
outlierIQR Set the inter-quartile range multipler used to calculate values that qualify as an outlier - Defaults to 1.5
boxLineColor CSS line colour used to outline the box
boxFillColor CSS fill colour used for the box
whiskerColor CSS colour used to draw the whiskers
outlierLineColor CSS colour used to draw the outlier circles
outlierFillColor CSS colour used to fill the outlier circles
spotRadius Radius in pixels to draw the outlier circles
medianColor CSS colour used to draw the median line
target If set to a value, then a small crosshair is drawn at that point to represent a target value
targetColor CSS colour used to draw the target crosshair, if set
minValue If minvalue and maxvalue are set then the scale of the plot is fixed. By default minValue and maxValue are deduced from the values supplied
maxValue See minValue

See also all of the common options above, that can also be used with box plot charts

As noted in the options above, by default "raw" is set to false. This means that you can just pass an arbitrarily long list of values to the sparkline function and the corresponding box plot will be calculated from those values. This is probably the behaviour you want most of the time.

If, on the other hand, you have thousands of values to deal with you may want to pre-compute the points needed for the box plot. In that case, set raw=true and pass in the computed values. If showing outliers, supplied values of:
low_outlier, low_whisker, q1, median, q3, high_whisker, high_outlier
Omit the outliers and set showOutliers to false to omit outlier display.

Interactive Sparklines

Version 2.0 of the plugin introduces support for interactive sparklines in the form of tooltips, mouseover highlighting and click interaction for all supported types of sparkline.

If you're happy with the default look and feel of the tooltips, you can skip this entire section.

Options to control sparkline interactions:

disableInteraction Set to true to disable all sparkline interactivity, making the plugin behave in much the same way as it did in 1.x
Defaults to false
disableTooltips Set to true to disable mouseover tooltips.
Defaults to false
disableHighlight Set to true to disable the highlighting of individual values when mousing over a sparkline.
Defaults to false
highlightLighten Controls the amount to lighten or darken a value when moused over. A value of 1.5 will lighten by 50%, 0.5 will darken by 50%.
Defaults to 1.4
highlightColor If specified, then values that are moused over will be changed to this colour instead of being lightend
tooltipContainer Specifies the DOM element that tooltips should be rendered into.
Defaults to document.body
tooltipClassname Specifies a CSS class name to apply to tooltips to override the default built-in style.
tooltipOffsetX Specifies how many pixels away from the mouse pointer to render the tooltip on the X axis
tooltipOffsetY Specifies how many pixels away from the mouse pointer to render the tooltip on the Y axis
tooltipFormatter Pass a javascript function to use as a callback to override the HTML used to generate tooltips. The callback will be passed arguments of (sparkline, options, fields).
sparkline is the sparkline object being rendered, "options" is the key:value mapping of options set for this sparkline - use options.get(key, default) to fetch an individual option. "fields" is an array of fields to render for the sparkline. This will be a single element array unless its a box plot.
tooltipChartTitle If specified then the tooltip uses the string specified by this setting as a title
tooltipFormat A format string or spformat object (or an array thereof for multiple entries) to control the format of the tooltip
tooltipPrefix A string to prepend to each field displayed in a tooltip
tooltipSuffix A string to append to each field displayed in a tooltip
tooltipSkipNull If true then null values will not have a tooltip displayed
Defaults to true
tooltipValueLookups An object or range map to map field values to tooltip strings. For example you may want to map -1, 0 and 1 to the strings "Lost", "Draw", "Won"
tooltipFormatFieldlist An array of values specifying which fields to display in a tooltip and in what order. Currently only useful for box plots. See below for more details
tooltipFormatFieldlistKey Specifies which key holds the field name to reference above. For box plots this should be "field"
numberFormatter Pass a javascript function to control how numbers are formatted in tooltips. The callback will be passwd a number to format and must return a string.
Default behaviour is to format numbers to western conventions.
numberDigitGroupSep Character to use for group separator in numbers "1,234" for l10n purposes.
Defaults to the comma - ","
numberDecimalMark Character to use for the decimal point in numbers for l10n purposes.
Defaults to the period - "."
numberDigitGroupCount Number of digits between the group seperator in numbers for l10n purposes.
Defaults to 3.

Formatting Tooltips

There are a couple of approaches you can take to format tooltips. Either you can manually generate tooltips by using the tooltipFormatter callback function (perhaps to hook in an external tooltip library), or you can use the other tooltip options above to fine-tune the default formatter.

The tooltipFormat and toolipValueLookups options provide the main methods of formatting the text displayed for each value in a toolip.

The tooltipFormat is applied whenever the mouse is moved over a value. Various fields enclosed between double curly braces in the format string are substituted depending on the type of sparkline in use. For example, the default format string for line charts is: 

  <span style="color: {{color}}">&#9679;</span> {{prefix}}{{y}}{{suffix}}</span>

"color" is derived from the colour of the line being drawn.
"prefix" and "suffix" and set by setting the tooltipPrefix and tooltipSuffix items.
"y" represents the y value of the point under the mouse. "x" can also be used to if useful.

The supported fields for the different types of sparklines include:

Box plot field order

For box plots, you can control which fields are displayed and in what order using the tooltipFormatFieldlist and tooltipFormatFieldlistKey options. For example, to display only the median, lower quartile and upper quartile values, in that order: 4,27,34,52,54,59,61,68,78,82,85,87,91,93,100

$('.boxplot').sparkline(values, {
    type: 'box', 
    tooltipFormatFieldlist: ['med', 'lq', 'uq'], 
    tooltipFormatFieldlistKey: 'field'
});

Formatting field names and values

You can translate field names and values to other arbitrary strings using the tooltipValueLookups option. Box plots do this, for example, to remap "lq" to the string "Lower Quartile", etc but you can also use it to map values (numbers) or ranges of values to strings too using a range map

For example, we can create a bar chart with tooltips that say "low", "medium" or "high" along with the value:   

var values = [1, 3, 5, 3, 8];
$('.bar').sparkline(values, {
    type: 'bar',
    tooltipFormat: '{{value:levels}} - {{value}}',
    tooltipValueLookups: {
        levels: $.range_map({ ':2': 'Low', '3:6': 'Medium', '7:': 'High' })
    }
});

You can also specify a CSS class name to associate with a format by passing the format string and class to $.spformat: 

$('.bar').sparkline(values, {
    type: 'bar',
    tooltipFormat: $.spformat('{{value}}', 'tooltip-class')
});

Click Events

When a user clicks on a sparkline, a sparklineClick event is generated. The event object contains a property called "sparklines" that holds an array of the sparkline objects under the mouse at the time of the click. For non-composite sparklines, this array will have just one entry.

This example will display an alert with the moused-over value whenever a value is clicked: 1,3,4,7,1,3,2,4,5,6,6,5 

$('.clickdemo').sparkline();
$('.clickdemo').bind('sparklineClick', function(ev) {
    var sparkline = ev.sparklines[0],
        region = sparkline.getCurrentRegionFields();
    alert("Clicked on x="+region.x+" y="+region.y);
});

The fields available from getCurrentRegionFields() match those listed in the formatting tooltips section, above.

Mouse-over Events

When the mouse moves over a different value in a sparkline a sparklineRegionChange event is generated. This can be useful to hook in an alternate tooltip library.

As with the sparklineClick event, the generated event has a property called sparklines that holds an array of the sparklines under the pointer.

Example that updates a span with the current region details: 1,3,4,7,1,3,2,4,5,6,6,5 Last region: 

$('.mouseoverdemo').sparkline();
$('.mouseoverdemo').bind('sparklineRegionChange', function(ev) {
    var sparkline = ev.sparklines[0],
        region = sparkline.getCurrentRegionFields(),
        value = region.y;
    $('.mouseoverregion').text("x="+region.x+" y="+region.y);
}).bind('mouseleave', function() {
    $('.mouseoverregion').text('');
});

License

This plugin is copyright Splunk Inc and licensed using the New BSD License

Download

Note: jquery.sparkline.js is a plugin for jQuery - You need to include both on your page to generate sparklines.

NOTE: Be sure to copy the files linked below to your own server - If you embed the plugin as a link from my server, your site will be broken when this site is down (as it occasionally is).

If you use the plugin on a production site I'd love to see it in action, so please send me an email! (be sure to include "jQuery Sparkline" in the subject).

You can download released versions below, or checkout the source directly from the jQuery Sparkline github repo.

Version 2.1.2:

Version 2.1.1:

Version 2.1:

Version 2.0:

Version 1.6:

Version 1.5.1:

Version 1.4.3:

Version 1.3:

Version 1.2.1:

Who's Using It

Are you using jquery.sparkline on your project or site? Send me a quick email and I'll add a link here! (try to send a link to an example of the plugin in action for bonus points ;-) )

Current users include:

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are there no axis labels/markers?

Sparklines are intended to be small enough to fit alongside a line of text, to give a quick impression of a trend or pattern and thus don't have the paraphernalia of full sized charts. As of version 2.0 you can mouse over the sparklines to see the underlying data.

How do I annotate a sparkline?

The plugin has no support for adding text to a sparkline, beyond that provided by tooltips. You can, of course, use HTML and CSS to add appropriate text next to the sparkline.

How can I change the way the tooltips look?

See Formatting Tooltips.

Can I use the plugin to create full-sized charts?

You can use the width and height properties to generate whatever sized charts you need, but really you'd be better served using a more full-featured charting library that will draw axis labels, etc. Some examples include:

How do I draw a sparkline on an element that is not yet in the DOM?

You need to know two things:

  1. The element you create must have some initial content, even if it's just &nbsp;
  2. After the element is inserted into the DOM (and visible), you must call $.sparkline_display_visible() to actually display it

Eg. 

// create an element and draw a sparkline
var barchart = $('<span>&nbsp;</span>');
barchart.sparkline([1,2,3,2], {type: 'bar'});
// insert the element somewhere into the DOM
$('#mycharts').append(barchart);
// actually render any undrawn sparklines that are now visible in the DOM
$.sparkline_display_visible();

Sparklines don't work correctly in IE

The plugin has been tested with IE 6-10. It is often important that the page they are used on is rendered in standards mode, however. This is done by providing the correct doctype at the start of the page: 

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" 
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

My sparklines aren't appearing when its parent element appears

Sparklines that are rendered into a hidden element (ie. one of its parent elemnts has display:none) will not be automatically rendered when the parent becomes visible: You have to expicitly tell the plugin to check to see which sparklines have become visible and render those now.

See the section on hidden sparklines for more details.

How do I ask a question that's not answered here?

Try posting a question to the jQuery Sparkline Google Group. A small, working example is very useful in debugging any issues you might be having.

How do I report a bug or feature request?

Please use the issue tracker on github.

Are patches accepted?

Patches are a good way to get a fix/feature into the plugin sooner rather than later. Ideally send a pull request via github.

Feedback

Questions and feedback about the plugin are welcome on the jQuery Sparkline Google Group.

Bugs and feature requests should be filed in the Github tracker.

If submitting a bug report, or asking a question it's very useful to have a simple working example that demonstrates your issue. As easy way to do that is to change this jsfiddle example and use the "fork" feature to create a shareable example of your own.

I (Gareth Watts) can be reached by email at - gareth@omnipotent.net (be sure to include "jQuery Sparkline" in the subject) or find me on Twitter