Reverse legend order without changing bar order in plotly express bar plot

Question

I'd like to change the order of the items in the legend of a plotly.express bar plot. For example, I'd like to show Dinner before Lunch on this plot (the current behavior is especially awkward with horizontal bar plots, since the order of the bars is the opposite of the legend order):

import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
# Sort to put dinner on top.
df.sort_values('time', ascending=False, inplace=True)
fig = px.bar(df, y='sex', x='total_bill', color='time', barmode='group',
             orientation='h')
fig.update_layout(yaxis={'categoryorder': 'total ascending'})
fig.show()

Does this answer your question? [Customizing the order of legends in plotly](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56808693/customizing-the-order-of-legends-in-plotly) — vestland, Jun 29 '20 at 14:55
@vestland I don't think so, it's not using `plotly.express` and while it mentions `traceorder` it doesn't suggest the simple answer I provided, `legend={'traceorder': 'reversed'}`. — Max Ghenis, Jul 01 '20 at 17:07

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 27 '20 at 14:31

Add legend={'traceorder': 'reversed'} to the update_layout statement:

import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
# Sort to put dinner on top.
df.sort_values('time', ascending=False, inplace=True)
fig = px.bar(df, y='sex', x='total_bill', color='time', barmode='group',
             orientation='h')
fig.update_layout(yaxis={'categoryorder': 'total ascending'},
                  legend={'traceorder': 'reversed'})
fig.show()

Reverse legend order without changing bar order in plotly express bar plot

1 Answers1