Issue creation guidelines

Last updated on

28 April 2017

Drupal 7 will no longer be supported after January 5, 2025. Learn more and find resources for Drupal 7 sites

This documentation page contains some guidelines for creating issues related to the Charts module. Either for bug reports, support requests or for feature requests.

Please understand that they are only guidelines: they cannot really be enforced and there may be exceptions to them. But requests that respect these guidelines automatically enhance the chances for a feature request to be accepted ... and implemented in a future release of the charts module.

Feel free to suggest corrections and / or refinements to this specific community documentation page where appropriate, preferably via the charts issue queue. But please be careful when editing this page, i.e. do not change these guidelines without discussing them first with the charts maintainers.

Stack Exchange

There are quite some questions, and answers, related to charting in Drupal on these Stack Exchange sites:

Drupal Answers contains quite some questions tagged with charts.
Stack Overflow contains quite some questions about charting in drupal.

Note: The current module maintainer is following these questions (and answers), both on Drupal Answers and on Stack Overflow ... If you do visit any of these questions or answers, consider upvoting where appropriate (if you have earned the privilege to do so ...).

Bug reports

Some items that should be included (where possible / appropriate):

Related to Using the Charts API or Creating charts using views?
Related to which library (HC, GC or both)?
If it is related to Using the Charts API, try to include the relevant code (even if it doesn't work yet as it should).
If it is related to Creating charts using views, try to include an export of the view (even if it doesn't work yet as it should). Refer to #493556: Cannot aggregate on taxonomy term for an illustration of such export.

Support request

Some items that should be included (where possible / appropriate):

Related to Using the Charts API or Creating charts using views?
Related to which library (HC, GC or both)?
If it is related to Using the Charts API, try to include the relevant code (even if it doesn't work yet as it should).
If it is related to Creating charts using views, try to include an export of the view (even if it doesn't work yet as it should). Refer to #493556: Cannot aggregate on taxonomy term for an illustration of such export.
Add a link to the relevant community documentation that you already looked at, and which seems to not yet provide an answer to your request (or seems to be misleading or incorrect).

Feature request evaluation

New feature requests is part of what makes a module grow over time. They get submitted via the creation of a new issue in a module's issue queue. The module maintainer(s) should then evaluate such request and hopefully some day the new feature gets added to a next version of the module.

That's the theory, however during the evaluation of such requests, the module maintainer(s) use some criteria for judging them. Below are some criteria that, at a minimum, are used to evaluate feature requests. So for anybody submitting a feature request, please be aware of these criteria.

Feature request evaluation criteria

Compliance with all supported libraries

Any feature request must be compatible with all supported libraries, i.e. both Google Charts and Highcharts.

Requests to "add feature X to library Y only" will not be accepted, at best they will receive a status of needs work or postponed.

When submitting these types of feature requests, it will help the module maintainers a lot if you include some brief description of what the requested feature is about. Where appropriate please include some URL pointing to some demo.

Here are some feature requests to add new features for the supported libraries, and which might be considered some day:

Supporting additional charting libraries

Charts (version 7.x-2.x) supports both the Google Charts library and the Highcharts library. It even includes provisions to extended it for using it with yet another (custom) charting library.

Requests to extend the list of currently supported libraries will be considered. However any Flash-based libraries will not be implemented anymore these days.

Without including a patch to add such support, there is a high risk that they will receive a status of needs work or postponed.

Here are some feature requests to support some other libraries, and which might be considered some day: