DIY Data Visualizations: Provide Unique Insights of Your Data with Reveal BI 

We live in an era where data shapes decisions across industries. While data visualizations have become essential, not all standard visualizations cater to specialized reporting needs.  

Enter DIY Custom Visualizations, a transformative feature we’re thrilled to introduce on our platform. Dive in to discover its unmatched benefits and how you can craft unique reports effortlessly. 

How Can You Benefit from Custom Visualizations

Before we dive into the how, let’s explore the top benefits of creating your own custom visualizations: 

Tailored Data Representation

Custom visualizations allow you to portray intricate data in an easily digestible format, ensuring alignment with your audience’s requirements. Whether you’re dealing with customer demographics, supply chain logistical management, financial data, or presenting to executives, clients, or colleagues, you can adapt the visualization to align with their needs. 

Simplified Complexity

Complex datasets often contain a wealth of key business insights but are typically overwhelming when presented in a raw format. Custom visualizations simplify their complexity by distilling data into clear, intuitive visuals highlighting essential trends, patterns, and outliers.  

Specialized Reports

In healthcare, finance, and manufacturing industries, specialized reports are often required to meet regulatory standards or specific business needs. With Reveal’s customization capabilities, you can create reports that adhere to these requirements without compromising data accuracy or clarity. 

Effective Data Storytelling

Visualizations are about telling a story with your data; custom visualizations enable you to craft highly effective data-driven stories. By arranging data elements and visuals in a narrative, you can guide your audience through a logical flow of information, leading decision-makers toward actionable insights.  

Enhanced User Experience

A well-designed custom visualization allows users to interact with the data more effectively, gaining deeper insights and a better understanding of the underlying information. 

DIY Custom Visualizations with Reveal

In Reveal, our extensive array of visualizations offers a versatile range of core visualization capabilities. These encompass data comparison, part-to-whole analysis, data distribution, trending analysis, data relationships, KPIs, gauges, and geospatial data visualization. You’ll find common business chart types as well as specialized options such as treemaps and scatter map charts among our offerings. 

But that’s not all. With our innovative addition to the platform, you can now take control of the chart types available within your dashboards. Tailor the experience for your users by eliminating any default chart types that may not suit your specific needs. Create customized groups to efficiently organize the available chart types, ensuring an intuitive and user-friendly interface. 

Moreover, we empower you to instantly integrate your own custom visualizations, complete with unique names and icons, with just four lines of code. This feature unlocks a universe of possibilities for showcasing your data in fresh and exciting ways, catering to your specific requirements. 

Reveal’s Custom Visualization Features

• Brand & Theming: Seamlessly match the brand and theming of your application, ensuring that your custom visualizations blend harmoniously with your product’s overall look and feel. 
• Custom Components: You have the freedom to create custom components that suit your specific needs, offering endless possibilities for data presentation and interactivity. 
• Dashboard Filtering: Your custom visualizations seamlessly participate in the dashboard filter experience and can be filtered and interacted with just like any other visualization. 
• Add/Edit Functionality: You can effortlessly add or edit custom visualizations in your dashboards and reports, making it easy for users to access and interact with them. 
• Self-Hosting Options: You can self-host your custom visualizations within your application or at any desired endpoint, providing complete control over their deployment. 
• Tailored User Experience: Reveal empowers you to deliver virtually any UI control or library within your custom visualizations.  

How Does Reveal Custom Visualization Work?

Next, let’s explore the process of how custom data visualizations work in Reveal, step by step, from adding the Reveal bridge JavaScript file to applying your branding and theming.

1. Custom Controls: Have your custom controls or visualizations ready. These can be based on any client framework since Reveal operates on a client-side JavaScript library. 

2. Include Reveal Bridge: Add the reveal.bridge.js JavaScript file to your project. This acts as a bridge between Reveal and your custom visualizations. 

3. Reference the Bridge: Ensure you reference the reveal.bridge.js file in your project where you’ve set up your custom visualizations. 

4. Assign Data: In your custom component, you must assign data to whatever values or rows your visualization expects. When fields are dragged in the Reveal editor, this assignment ensures the custom visualization uses the data from Reveal correctly. 

5. Integration with Reveal: The custom visualization will behave similarly to native visualizations in Reveal. When you add a new visualization, you’ll still be using the same visualization editor as if it were a native component. This includes dragging fields, the visualization appearing in the editor and saving it, and it will automatically participate in the filter experience of the application. 

6. Self-Hosted: The custom visualizations are self-hosted, which means they can be wherever you want them to be. This could be within the core Reveal client app or at other endpoints. 

7. Add Custom Visualization to Chart Chooser: When you add this custom visualization to the Chart Chooser in Reveal, you can customize the endpoints where the visualizations are hosted. 

8. Apply Theming and Branding: You can match the brand and theming of your application since you have full control over the Reveal theming and branding. You can apply that same theming and branding to your custom components. 

Creating Your Custom Visualizations

With Reveal’s DIY custom visualizations feature, you can tailor the experience for your users by controlling the chart types available within your dashboards. This customization ensures that your data is presented in a way that’s most relevant to your specific needs. Here’s how to do it in just a few lines of code: 

1.Update Chart Type

To update an existing chart type, you can easily modify its properties, including its name, icon, and grouping. Find the chart type in the revealView.chartTypes property and add these four lines of code: 

var barConfig = revealView.chartTypes.find(x => x.chartType == 'BarChart');  
barConfig.title = 'My Cool Bar';  
barConfig.icon = 'https://help.revealbi.io/img/logo.png';  
barConfig.groups = ["Enterprise Visualizations", "HR", "Some Other Category"]; 

2.Remove Chart Type

If there are default chart types that you don’t need, you can remove them effortlessly by finding the index of the chart type item you want removed, and remove it from the chartTypes array with this code: 

var gridConfig = revealView.chartTypes.find(x => x.chartType == 'Grid');  
revealView.chartTypes.splice(revealView.chartTypes.indexOf(gridConfig), 1); 

3.Add Custom Chart Type

Adding your custom visualizations as new chart types in the Chart Types drop-down is the most exciting part. This opens up a world of possibilities for presenting your data, and it only takes these few lines of code:  

revealView.chartTypes.push({  
    title: "Custom Viz",  
    url: "https://host/customViz.html", //provide the url to your custom visualization  
    icon: "https://help.revealbi.io/img/logo.png",  
    groups: ["Custom Visualizations"]  
}); 

DIY Custom Visualizations Video Tutorial

See for yourself how easily it is to create your own unique visualizations in our tutorial by Reveal’s Sr. VP of Developers Tools and data analytics expert, Jason Beres:  

Get Started with Custom Visualizations

We hope you enjoyed learning about custom visualizations with us. You can learn more about our product by scheduling a free product tour so we can take you through Reveal’s different features and functionalities. Alternatively, you can also download our SDK and try it yourself.  

If you’re testing the feature in our product but are facing any issues or need extra guidance, contact our product team via our Discord channel.   

Finally, we would love you to share your thoughts with us. Your input shapes our product, ensuring we deliver features that provide maximum value to you and your customers. Let us know if you think there is anything else we can add to improve Reveal’s ease of use, and we will add it to our roadmap.