Live Charts

Copy link to clipboardAdd a Live Chart to your application

Live Charts display numerical data in a visual format. This allows users to have a clearer view of the numerical data, which is useful for insight and analysis. Chart data can be published from a 3rd party service or from within your application.

Copy link to clipboardLive Metric

A Live Metric shows the latest data associated with an event. Combining this data with historical data can help to show trends and patterns in a chart.

Copy link to clipboardWhere can I use Live Charts and Live Metrics?

• Financial market data

• Viewer count on a virtual event

• Weather data (temperature)

• Multiplayer game leaderboard

• Instant sales updates

Copy link to clipboardOther Possible Features?

You can incorporate more functionality within your Live Charts such as:

• Modifying chart visualizations depending on the type of data

• Giving users the ability to drill into the data in a table format

Copy link to clipboardBuilding your Live Chart

Ably has simple yet powerful APIs to help you to build Live Charts, that support insight and analysis.

Copy link to clipboardAbly Channels

Channel is the unit of distribution of messages. Channels can be used to segment the data. For example, different locations for weather, different chart data to be displayed etc. Users or their devices can subscribe to a specific or multiple channels.

• channels.get - to get an existing or create a new channel

Copy link to clipboardAbly Pub/Sub Messaging

Pub/Sub is an architectural pattern used to distribute real-time information, as messages. Messages can be of any format. For Live Charts, the data will represent a data point for the chart. Publishing multiple messages allows the chart to be drawn.

• channel.subscribe - to subscribe to messages on a channel

• channel.publish(data) - to publish a message on a channel

Copy link to clipboardAbly Rewind/History

History provides access to historical messages. This can be used to see previously published messages. 

• channel.history - to get a paginated history of channel messages

Rewind allows you to specify, at the time of attaching to a channel, where to start the attachment from. This is another way to get historical information consistently of subscribing and receiving messages from a channel without using another API.

Copy link to clipboardGetting started: Live Charts

You'll need to do the following to get started with adding Live Charts to your application.

• Implement the UI for the Live Chart and/or Live Metric

• Consider the integration needed to publish data into your application

Copy link to clipboardWhat's next?

• Sign up for a free Ably account

• Download one of our SDKs

• Explore all other examples