Add support for clickable hover text or a per pt onclick attribute

[etpinard]

Users can put links inside hover labels, but when user try to click the link, the hover label obviously disappears. So perhaps we could add optional “sticky” hover labels, where you click and the hover label is persistent until you click again?

Defining what sticky means will be tricky. It probably doesn't apply to every situation. Maybe we could add it as a new layout.hovermode e.g. 'hovermode: 'sticky'.

So, maybe instead we could define a linkonclick attribute e.g. linkonclick: ['https://plot.ly/~empet/101', 'https://plot.ly', /* ... one link per data pt */] that way clicking on a data pt would open the link instead of hovering on the data pt -> move mouse over link in hover label -> click on it.

cc @jackparmer

[john-soklaski]

We definitely would have use for a hover label that the user can interact with. There is quite a bit of information in our hover labels (5-6 lines of text), and users would often like to copy and paste some text from the hover label, or potentially click a link.

[jackparmer]

@john-soklaski what do you think the right interaction is for allowing a user to select copy paste what is in a hover tag?

[john-soklaski]

@jackparmer I think persisting the hover label if a user moves the mouse cursor along the arrow to the hoverlabel makes sense (with hovermode: closest)

[maresk]

@jackparmer I will second this feature request in the python API. Our clients would like to be able to interact with content related to a particular data point so ss far as interaction goes, the text should persist, and a hyperlink placed in the text should be clickable.

[latorrefabian]

+1

[dr-stringfellow]

+1

[jackparmer]

@john-soklaski , @maresk , @latorrefabian , @maierbenedikt - you may be interested in discussion here, Annotations that show & hide on clicking data: #1266

[alexcjohnson]

And see the implementation of clicktoshow in #1265 - at some point we do intend to implement a way to generate "sticky" annotations programmatically on clicking a data point but for now, as long as you don't have too much data you can do it the other way around: pre-generate all the annotations you might want and link them to appear on clicking the appropriate data points.

[slremy]

Hello all!
Am I missing something fundamental here? Is there a purpose of being able to have hyperlinks in the text if you can't click them?

[alexcjohnson]

Am I missing something fundamental here? Is there a purpose of being able to have hyperlinks in the text if you can't click them?

We support text in a lot of different contexts, and in most of the other contexts the links are clickable. So it would require special code to disable link creation within the unclickable contexts, and that extra complexity seemed unnecessary since really, is there a purpose to adding hyperlinks that you can't click? 😉

[slremy]

That makes sense!

[PaNDanese]

what do you think the right interaction is for allowing a user to select copy paste what is in a hover tag?

@jackparmer I think clicking on the marker itself would be ideal to toggle the stickiness of the hover tag.

• Click on the marker and the hover tag persists and you can then copy/paste hover tag-text and click on hyperlinks in the hover tag
• Click on the marker again and the hover tag "unsticks".

+1 for utility

[wroscoe]

+1 for this. This would enable users to dig into the data by linking other related charts. I like the simple solution proposed by @pdanese