unable to set tickwidth and tickcolor via template

[archmoj]

Demo

[archmoj]

@alexcjohnson
Hmm... not sure if this is a bug?
It goes down to here:

plotly.js/src/plots/cartesian/layout_defaults.js

Lines 219 to 221 in bee2455

	if(!Lib.isPlainObject(layoutIn[axName])) {
	layoutIn[axName] = {};
	}

Should we support template for axes?

[alexcjohnson]

I think the problem is a little more subtle than that. We do support templating axes, but currently Lib.coerce2 does not consider a template value to be "non-default."

Consider: just adding empty containers for the axes also doesn't show the ticks:

Plotly.newPlot(gd, {
  data: data,
  layout: {
    template: {layout: layout},
    yaxis: {},
    xaxis: {}
  }
});

But if you explicitly turn the ticks on they have the style from the template:

Plotly.newPlot(gd, {
  data: data,
  layout: {
    template: {layout: layout},
    yaxis: {ticks: 'outside'},
    xaxis: {ticks: 'inside'}
  }
});

And if you turn ticks on explicitly from the template, that also makes them appear:

var layout = {
  "yaxis": {
    "type": "log",
    "tickwidth": 5,
    "tickcolor": "green",
    ticks: 'outside'
  },
  "xaxis": {
    "type": "date",
    "tickwidth": 50,
    "tickcolor": "red",
    ticks: 'outside'
  }
};
Plotly.newPlot(gd, {
  data: data,
  layout: {
    template: {layout: layout}
  }
});

What's happening is in this block:

plotly.js/src/plots/cartesian/tick_mark_defaults.js

Lines 21 to 24 in bee2455

	var tickLen = Lib.coerce2(containerIn, containerOut, layoutAttributes, 'ticklen');
	var tickWidth = Lib.coerce2(containerIn, containerOut, layoutAttributes, 'tickwidth');
	var tickColor = Lib.coerce2(containerIn, containerOut, layoutAttributes, 'tickcolor', containerOut.color);
	var showTicks = coerce('ticks', (options.outerTicks || tickLen || tickWidth || tickColor) ? 'outside' : '');

Lib.coerce2 returns false because no user value was provided, even though the template provided a value. So ticks defaults to '' rather than 'outside'.

In this particular case I think it's clear that we want to consider the template value to be "non-default" and to therefore cause ticks to be shown. I think that's a generally true statement, following from the principle that layout: obj should produce equivalent output to layout: {template: {layout: obj}}, so we should fix that at the level of Lib.coerce2, but we should explore some of the other uses of Lib.coerce2 before deciding that for sure.

[archmoj]

Reopening after the revert by #5016.