Line graph not connected after applying ggplotly()

Question

I have the following dataset

bike2 <- structure(list(dteday = c("2011-01", "2011-02", "2011-03", "2011-04", 
"2011-05", "2011-06", "2011-07", "2011-08", "2011-09", "2011-10", 
"2011-11", "2011-12", "2012-01", "2012-02", "2012-03", "2012-04", 
"2012-05", "2012-06", "2012-07", "2012-08", "2012-09", "2012-10", 
"2012-11", "2012-12"), cnt = c(38189L, 48215L, 63422L, 94870L, 
135821L, 143512L, 141341L, 136691L, 127418L, 123511L, 102167L, 
87323L, 96744L, 103137L, 164875L, 174224L, 195865L, 202830L, 
203607L, 214503L, 218573L, 198841L, 152664L, 123713L)), row.names = c(NA, 
-24L), class = c("tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"))

And this is the graph I currently have

a = ggplot(transform(bike2, year = substr(dteday, 1, 4)), 
       aes(x=dteday, y=cnt, group = 1, color = year))+
  geom_line(size = 1.2) + 
  labs(title = "Bike Rentals Per Month",
       x = "Month/Year",
       y = "Count") + 
  ggthemes::theme_solarized() +
  theme(axis.text.x=element_text(angle=45, hjust=1))

a

However, when I tried to apply ggplotly() to the graph, the line disconnects.

plotly::ggplotly(a)

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

A related question notes that plotly describes series slightly differently than ggplot, leading to some translation issues like this one.

One workaround would be to be explicit about what you want to show for each element, using geom_segment:

library(dplyr)
bike2 %>%
  mutate(dteday_next = lead(dteday),
         year = substr(dteday, 1, 4),
         cnt_next = lead(cnt)) %>%
ggplot(aes(x=dteday, xend = dteday_next,
           y=cnt, yend = cnt_next, color = year))+
  geom_segment() +
  labs(title = "Bike Rentals Per Month",
       x = "Month/Year",
       y = "Count") + 
  ggthemes::theme_solarized() +
  theme(axis.text.x=element_text(angle=45, hjust=1)) -> a
a

plotly::ggplotly(a)