restyle not working for ternary charts

[VeraZab]

Hi,
I'm unable to create ternary charts with the restyle function:
http://codepen.io/veraz/pen/GZeVVx

Could you please take a look. Thanks!

[etpinard]

There are two distinct issues highlighted in this bug report.

1. Cartesian axes not clearing after the first restyle call
2. Ternary a, b, c data arrays are not updating in the subsequent restyle calls.

For 1. that's the intended behaviour (unfortunately).

Full explanation: the first Plotly.plot call creates a graph with 1 visible: false trace (because it has no x/y coordinates). This invisible trace spans a set of cartesian axes - you can see it by adding console.log(gd.layout.xaxis, gd.layout.yaxis). Then, Plotly.restyle updates that first trace to type scatterternary which spans a ternary layout object - you can see it by adding console.log(gd.layout.ternary), BUT does not remove the now-orphan layout.xaxis and layout.yaxis. Note that this Plotly.plot + Plotly.restyle signature works as expected for scattergeo and scatter3d restyle calls because of this very cheeky block that hasn't been expended for ternary on purpose because I'm thinking about dropping it in v2.0.0. For more info about how orphan subplots work see PR #289.

To fix issue: http://codepen.io/etpinard/pen/ which is far from clean. Bringing in @chriddyp , how hard would it be for trace type updates to be done through newPlot instead? That would be the most robust solution I think. If that's inconceivable, we could make ternary subplot on-par with geo and gl3d by not showing orphan cartesian axes when ternary subplots are present.

For 2. well ... that's a bug.

But an easy one to fix: we just need to add a, b, c to the list of recalc restyle attributes here.

[chriddyp]

anything is possible. we can probably make that work.

[mdtusz]

Part 2 is complete - part 2 however will likely remain as is until v2.0 or a significant framework refactor ¯_(ツ)_/¯ . We can close this if everyone is satisfied.