Using the API

Making API-calls

Create a chart

To create an empty chart, you can use

dw_create_chart()

which will use the API key stored locally on your system.

By default, Datawrapper will create an empty linechart, without a title. The function returns a dw_chart-object with the metadata-elements from the API. This object can be used to populate the chart_id-argument in all other functions - which means you don’t have to deal with it. Just store the response from dw_create_chart() in your R-environment.

Add data to the chart

To populate that chart with data, you can run

dw_data_to_chart(
  x = DATAFRAME, 
  chart_id = CHART_ID_OR_dw_chart-object
  )

which uploads an R data.frame to an Datawrapper chart.

The data.frame should already be in the right format, only including the expected columns for the chart. The API will asume, that the first row contains headers. If that’s not true, you have to edit the metadata afterwards:

Edit chart’s metadata

dw_edit_chart(
  chart_id = CHART_ID_OR_dw_chart-object, 
  title = "I'm a title", 
data = 
  list(
    `horizontal-header` = "false"
    )
)

Datawrapper offers a lot of variability in editing it’s charts’ metadata. You can find a whole Documentation here.

To speed things up, the dw_edit_chart()-function has some built-in arguments for common transformations:

• title
• intro which is the text below the title
• annotate which is the text below the plot
• byline which is the name of the author
• source_name which states the source
• source_url which links to the source - but only if a source_name is provided

If you want to edit specific arguments in your plot, you can use the arguments data, visualize, describe and publish to include lists to the API call which change all possible settings in a chart, as shown in the example above.

When you’re finished editing your chart, you might want to publish it:

dw_publish_chart(
  chart_id = CHART_ID_OR_dw_chart-object
  )

This function returns a URL to the chart and the embed code, if you set the argument return_urls to TRUE.

Delete chart

Or you might want to delete a chart:

dw_delete_chart(
  chart_id = CHART_ID_OR_dw_chart-object
  )

Export chart

You can export charts as png - or even in pdf or svg, if you’re using a paid plan.

exported_chart <- dw_export_chart(
  chart_id = CHART_ID_OR_dw_chart-object, 
  type = c("png", "pdf", "svg")
  )