Client Side Exporting In HighChart

In a normal case, the data of your chart is being sent to an external server which is http://export.highcharts.com/. But if your product is already in a production environment, none of your clients will agree with the idea of sending their data to any third-party server. Am I right? To overcome this, HighChart has given an option called offline-exporting. Here we will discuss that. I hope you will like this.

Background

For the past few months, I have been working on a project where I use HighChart to manipulate the data and show it as Charts. Now the problem is while exporting the data, the entire data was going to the HighChart server which is http://export.highcharts.com/. I wanted to get rid of this. So I used the option of client-side exporting by adding one extra JavaScript file https://code.highcharts.com/modules/offline-exporting.js.

Using the code

First, we will populate the chart. For that, you must add the needed references as follows.

<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.2.4.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://code.highcharts.com/highcharts.js"></script>
<script src="https://code.highcharts.com/modules/exporting.js"></script>

Now add the chart configuration as follows.

$(function() {
    $('#myChart').highcharts({
        credits: {
            enabled: false
        },
        exporting: {
            chartOptions: {
                plotOptions: {
                    series: {
                        dataLabels: {
                            enabled: true
                        }
                    }
                }
            },
            scale: 3
        },
        title: {
            text: 'My blog vistor count for a week'
        },
        subtitle: {
            text: 'Monday to Sunday'
        },
        chart: {
            type: 'area'
        },
        xAxis: {
            categories: ['Mon', 'Tue', 'Wed', 'Thu', 'Fri', 'Sat', 'Sun']
        },
        series: [{
            name: 'Visitor Count',
            data: [1005, 558, 1467, 707, 1289, 867, 543]
        }]
    });
});

Now if you run your application, you can see a chart as follows.

High Chart

Now it is time to check the exporting. If you click on the export icon in the right top corner, you will be given options to choose like which format you need to export the data. Just click on anything you wish. You can see that the data is being sent to the server http://export.highcharts.com/ in the top left side. To overcome this, you need to add a reference to the file called offline-exporting.js.

<script src="https://code.highcharts.com/modules/offline-exporting.js"></script>

That’s all. You are done.

Please note that this feature is not supported in browser IE 8, So if you load this chart in any unsupported browser, the module will fall back to the export server. This can be handled with the optionfallbackToExportServer: false. You need to set this option in your exporting settings as follows.

exporting: {
  chartOptions: {
    plotOptions: {
      series: {
        dataLabels: {
          enabled: true
        }
      }
    }
  },
  scale: 3,
  fallbackToExportServer: false
}

Internet Explorer requires canvg library to export the chart to PNG format. But you don’t need to worry about this file. This will be automatically downloaded on demand by the system.

Reference

client-side-export

Conclusion

Did I miss anything that you may think is needed? Did you find this post useful? I hope you liked this article. Please share with me your valuable suggestions and feedback.

What do you think?

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Demo

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