Adding a legend to a pie chart using highcharter, or Rcharts

Question

I need to add a legend to a piechart using any highcharts package for R on a shiny app(highcharter, rcharts, whatever).

Ex. Code

library("shiny")
library("highcharter")

data(citytemp)

ui <- fluidPage(
  h1("Highcharter Demo"),
  fluidRow(
    column(width = 4, class = "panel",
           selectInput("type", label = "Type", width = "100%",
                       choices = c("line", "column", "bar", "spline")), 
           selectInput("stacked", label = "Stacked",  width = "100%",
                       choices = c(FALSE, "normal", "percent")),
           selectInput("theme", label = "Theme",  width = "100%",
                       choices = c(FALSE, "fivethirtyeight", "economist",
                                   "darkunica", "gridlight", "sandsignika",
                                   "null", "handdrwran", "chalk")
           )
    ),
    column(width = 8,
           highchartOutput("hcontainer",height = "500px")
    )
  )
)

server = function(input, output) {

  output$hcontainer <- renderHighchart({

    hc <- hc_demo() %>%
      hc_rm_series("Berlin") %>% 
      hc_chart(type = 'pie')

    if (input$stacked != FALSE) {
      hc <- hc %>%
        hc_plotOptions(showInLegend=TRUE,dataLabels=FALSE)
    }
    hc

  })

}

shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

The code runs a crappy example of a pie chart, and no matter where I look I can't find an example of a highcharts pie chart with legends.

Attempts to fix it include:

hc_legend(enabled=TRUE) <-- does not work, makes no change.

hc_plotOptions(showInLegend=TRUE,dataLabels=FALSE) <-- Again, no change

Using Rcharts with similar attempts, they both failed, I then became hopelessly lost looking through source code for highcharts

Using similar functionality I was able to create highchart pie charts with legends in a typical JS format by using either of the two solutions above, does anybody have a reasonable solution to this problem? Possibly a link to a decent resource for figuring it out?

actual JS example of highcharts with legend, shamelessly ripped from offical highcharts website.

 $(function () { $(document).ready(function () { // Build the chart $('#container').highcharts({ chart: { plotBackgroundColor: null, plotBorderWidth: null, plotShadow: false, type: 'pie' }, title: { text: 'Browser market shares January, 2015 to May, 2015' }, tooltip: { pointFormat: '{series.name}: <b>{point.percentage:.1f}%</b>' }, plotOptions: { pie: { allowPointSelect: true, cursor: 'pointer', showInLegend: true } }, series: [{ name: 'Brands', colorByPoint: true, data: [{ name: 'Microsoft Internet Explorer', y: 56.33 }, { name: 'Chrome', y: 24.03, sliced: true, selected: true }, { name: 'Firefox', y: 10.38 }, { name: 'Safari', y: 4.77 }, { name: 'Opera', y: 0.91 }, { name: 'Proprietary or Undetectable', y: 0.2 }] }] }); }); }); 

 <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script> <script src="https://code.highcharts.com/highcharts.js"></script> <script src="https://code.highcharts.com/modules/exporting.js"></script> <div id="container" style="min-width: 310px; height: 400px; max-width: 600px; margin: 0 auto"></div> 

Answer 1

First of all, in your example the hc_demo() is a line chart example, so it will not work well just by changing the type of the chart due to the data is not coded as required for a pie chart ( y and name values).

Here are is a raw example. As you showed in the javascript example you just need to force to show the legend because for pie charts the default value is false . This is achieved using plotOptions -> pie -> showInLegend = TRUE.

library(highcharter)
highchart() %>% 
  hc_chart(type = "pie") %>% 
  hc_plotOptions(
    series = list(showInLegend = TRUE)
  ) %>% 
  hc_add_series(data = list(
    list(y = 3, name = "cat 1"),
    list(y = 4, name = "cat 2")
    )
  )

Finally I recommend you check replicating highcharts demos in highcharter .