This seems easy as it requires just to change x parameter to y in the plot specification. Well, there are some edge cases where R users might get a in trouble!

library(plotly)
packageVersion('plotly')

[1] '4.7.1'

Before you go, let me just explain myself. I have just started learning R interface to plotly library and I am really amazed by the effort people done to make those wires connected and possible to be used for a broad audience.

set.seed(2); values <- rnorm(50)
p1 <- plot_ly(x = values, type = "histogram", name = "default")
p2 <- plot_ly(y = values, type = "histogram", name = "flipped")
subplot(p1, p2)

What if the plotly object specification is longer than several dozen of lines and one would like to have this feature parametrized in a function’s call? Like in the shiny application, to have the flip as an option?

The quickest solution is to provide an if statement like

#' @param values Numeric values to be used in the plot.
#' @param flip Logical: should the plot be a horizontal histogram?
to_flip_or_not_to_flip <- function(values, flip = FALSE){
   if (flip) {
      p <- plot_ly(y = values, type = "histogram", name = "flipped")
   } else {
      p <- plot_ly(x = values, type = "histogram", name = "default")
   }
   p
}
#' @examples
#' to_flip_or_not_to_flip(p)
#' to_flip_or_not_to_flip(p, flip = TRUE)

This is a typical redundancy of the code. Imagine the plot being created in a loop with many extra layers, where in the end the specification is longer than 50 lines. Would you copy and paste all 50 lines just to substitute x with y?

orientation parameter

Maybe orientation parameter is an option? After the reference: https://plot.ly/r/reference/#histogram

p3 <- plot_ly(x = values, type = "histogram", name = "orient v", orientation = "v")
p4 <- plot_ly(x = values, type = "histogram", name = "orient h", orientation = "h")
subplot(p3, p4)

one get a wrong plot. values should be assigned to y parameter again.

Of course there is a plotly guide book for R users (where I’ve learned subplot()) but one is not going to read the whole documentation just to create a simple horizontal histogram (I suppose).

The solution?

One can create the list with all possible parameters that he/she would like to specify (besides default parameters) and then change the name of x parameter to y in that list depending on flip requirements?

parameters <- list(
   x = values,
   type = "histogram",
   name = "x"
)
p5 <- do.call(plot_ly, parameters)

# if (flip) {
   names(parameters)[1] <- "y"
   parameters$name <- "y"
# }
p6 <- do.call(plot_ly, parameters)
subplot(p5, p6)

My personal best?

Change the object directly after you have specified the plot. One can easily guess what needs to be changed after looking to str(plot) call. We would change data attributes and will rename x object to y. See that we can also modify values, not only names of parameters.

p7 <- p5
str(p7$x$attrs)
# if (flip) {
   names(p7$x$attrs[[1]])[1] <- "y"
   p7$x$attrs[[1]]$name <- "y - change object directly"
# }
subplot(p5, p7)

Other solutions?

Do you know cleaner approach? Please don’t hesitate to leave comments at mine blog.

I suppose one could create a plot in ggplot2 and then apply ggplotly() function but I am not convinced this function translates all possible further plots to the client ready format, so I’d like to stick to plotly interface.

Note: sorry for print screens. I could not get interactive results for plotly in the Rmarkdown document compiled with a jekyll and knitr.