What would be a good approach for providing d3 capability in a dust-helper?

Question

Right now I've been considering writing a dust-helper that renders barcharts into dust files server-side using a custom dust-helper and the d3 module for node. I was wondering if there was a better way than to construct some sort of context object like this to pass to the dust renderer:

{
  padding: {
    top: integer,
    right: integer,
    bottom: integer,
    left: integer
  },
  width: integer,
  height: integer,
  data: [datum, ...],
  x: {
    scale: {
      type: string, // 'linear', 'time', 'ordinal'
      range: 'extent', // optionally [lower, upper]
      tick: { // if applicable
        format: string, // d3 number format for linear scale
                        // d3 time format for time scale
        args: integer | [interval, integer]
      }
    },
    value: string, // datum[value] used for x-axis
  },
  y: {
    ...
  }
}

And so on, then have d3 use this scheme to render the customized components and return the SVG markup as a string. This seems like a very verbose option to me, with a lot of requirement to add more and more attributes that bloat the context until it becomes too messy to manage well, which is why I was wondering if there was a better approach by perhaps splitting dust helpers for individual components of d3.

This is a broad question. Without taking into account dust syntax or helper functionality, what would your ideal case look like? I'm unsure how you would successfully encapsulate so much information without writing it out — Interrobang, Aug 08 '15 at 00:02
@Interrobang My ideal case would look like dust helpers that can take data and map it to SVG markup.. but now that I think about it, writing the dust helpers to implement d3 would be the wrong way of going about it. — Patrick Roberts, Aug 08 '15 at 02:06

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 08 '15 at 20:25

I've been thinking about it and the best way I think to go about using d3 as a dust filter instead as the following:

dust.filters.d3 = function(value) {
    var node = d3.select(value).node();

    if (node) {
        return node.outerHTML;
    }

    return 'd3 selection not found';
};

And just running the d3 code before starting the dust rendering.

What would be a good approach for providing d3 capability in a dust-helper?

1 Answers1