Victory Usage Feedback

[joshvillbrandt]

Hi! I attempted to utilize Victory for my charting needs, but ultimately jumped shipped because of a few issues. I thought I'd voice my difficulties for the benefit of the maintainers and community.

Multiple Y Axes

It appears that while Victory does allow multiple dependent axis elements, it does not support a different domain for each dependent axis. While multiple dependent axes this is technically achieved as demonstrated by this demo, a significant burden is place onto the user to normalize all of the data and the re-create all of the reasonable defaults for other elements. This really should be handled inside of Victory in my opinion. See #431 for some relevant discussion.

Legend Positioning

I wanted a legend below my chart that overflow series names onto new lines as required to fit into the outer width of the chart. This seems like a pretty standard use case of a legend, but the interface only seems to allow explicit manually positioning of the legend rather than something more intuitive like orientation="below". Additionally, I would need to specify itemsPerRow to overflow series names onto new lines, but this should really be calculated based on the rendered size of each legend name.

Styling using CSS

My application uses SASS to style everything and utilizing SASS/CSS to style Victory seems a bit challenging. First, there are few / no distinguishing class names or tag names within the DOM hierarchy to distinguish elements like an axis versus a series line. To work around this, I was able to use element positions within the parent element as the selector. Additionally, numerous properties are applied directly to the elements which requires !important to be added to every property assigned via CSS. I briefly tried setting <VictoryChart theme={{}} /> which removes most of the properties assigned to the elements, but then I would need to recreate nearly all of the styles from scratch in CSS. This issue ultimately wasn't a deal-breaker, but still provided some friction.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Feel free to close this issue after reviewing.

I look forward to trying out Victory again in the future if some of these issues are fixed!!