Fill background intervals in ggplotly line graph

Question

I'm trying to fill the background of a ggplot line graph to indicate day/night periods. The method in this answer works great, but I want to display them interactively using ggplotly, and that becomes a problem because of this bug, where ggplotly doesn't like -Inf and Inf used as the y limits for geom_rect. Does anyone know of a workaround that will work with ggplotly?

For the sake of readability, I've pasted the example code from the other answer in here:

library(ggplot2)
dat <- data.frame(x = 1:100, y = cumsum(rnorm(100)))
#Breaks for background rectangles
rects <- data.frame(xstart = seq(0,80,20), xend = seq(20,100,20), col = letters[1:5])

p <- ggplot() + 
  geom_rect(data = rects, aes(xmin = xstart, xmax = xend, ymin = -Inf, ymax = Inf, fill = col), alpha = 0.4) +
  geom_line(data = dat, aes(x,y))
p

produces this lovely figure:

However, if you do this:

ggplotly(p)

You lose the background fills:

This doesn't produce the exact same result where the coloured rectangles reach all the way to the top and bottom but you could use the following: Replace `ymin` and `ymax` `+/- Inf` arguments by `min(dat$y)` and `max(dat$x)` as a workaround. This way the colours will definitely cover all of your `geom_line`, just not reach to the very outside of the plotting area. — juljo, Sep 18 '20 at 08:20

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 18 '20 at 08:41

As juljo mentioned in his comment, the issue is the rectangles' y-range.

To resolve this issue:

Plot your data first

library(ggplot2)
library(plotly) 
dat <- data.frame(x = 1:100, y = cumsum(rnorm(100)))

#Breaks for background rectangles
rects <- data.frame(xstart = seq(0,80,20), xend = seq(20,100,20), col = letters[1:5])

# Only plot the data
p <- ggplot() + 
    geom_line(data = dat, aes(x,y))

Get the y-range of the plot

    ylims = ggplot_build(p)$layout$panel_params[[1]]$y.range

Use the y-range to create the rectangles and add them to the plot

    p = p + 
        geom_rect(data = rects, aes(xmin = xstart, xmax = xend, ymin = ylims[1], ymax = ylims[2], fill = col), alpha = 0.4)

`p`:

`ggplotly(p)`:

Thanks! I had mostly figured it out on my own but I really appreciate the bit about getting the graph's range after the fact. — Luther Blissett, Sep 18 '20 at 08:50

Fill background intervals in ggplotly line graph

1 Answers1

`p`:

`ggplotly(p)`:

Linked

Fill background intervals in ggplotly line graph

1 Answers1

p:

ggplotly(p):

Linked

`p`:

`ggplotly(p)`: