Your First Chart

Your First Chart

With Highcharts included in your webpage you are ready to create your first chart.

We will start off by creating a simple bar chart.

1. Add a div in your webpage. Give it an id and set a specific width and height which will be the width and height of your chart.

   <div id="container" style="width:100%; height:400px;"></div>

    
2. A chart is initialized by adding the JavaScript tag, <script> </script>, anywhere in a webpage, containing the following code. The div from #1 is referenced in the constructor.

   $(function () { 
       var myChart = Highcharts.chart('container', {
           chart: {
               type: 'bar'
           },
           title: {
               text: 'Fruit Consumption'
           },
           xAxis: {
               categories: ['Apples', 'Bananas', 'Oranges']
           },
           yAxis: {
               title: {
                   text: 'Fruit eaten'
               }
           },
           series: [{
               name: 'Jane',
               data: [1, 0, 4]
           }, {
               name: 'John',
               data: [5, 7, 3]
           }]
       });
   });

   The code above uses the jQuery specific way of launching code on document ready, but this can be replace by general onready handlers.

   If you are inserting a Stock chart, there is a separate constructor method called Highcharts.StockChart. In these charts, typically the data is supplied in a separate JavaScript array, either taken from a separate JavaScript file or by an Ajax call to the server.

   var chart1; // globally available
   $(function() {
          chart1 = Highcharts.stockChart('container', {
            rangeSelector: {
               selected: 1
            },
            series: [{
               name: 'USD to EUR',
               data: usdtoeur // predefined JavaScript array
            }]
         });
      });

3. You should now see this chart on your webpage:

   

4. Optionally, you can apply a global theme to your charts. A theme is just a set of options that are applied globally through the Highcharts.setOptions method. The download package comes with four predefined themes. To apply a theme from one of these files, add this directly after the highcharts.js file inclusion:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/themes/gray.js"></script>

For more details on how the options or settings in Highcharts work see How to set options.

Below is a list of online examples of the examples shown in this article:

• Simple bar chart (jQuery)
• Highstock Example