v4.0.0

[4.0.0] - 2019-07-16

This is a major release that includes many new features, and a few breaking changes. See the version 4 announcement for a summary of the important changes.

Updated

• Updated Plotly.js to version 1.48.3. See the plotly.js CHANGELOG for more information.

Added

• The Plotly Express tech preview (https://medium.com/@plotlygraphs/introducing-plotly-express-808df010143d) has been integrated as the plotly.express module (#1613)
• Added a new renderers framework the supports rendering figure in a wide variety of contexts (#1474). See the new Displaying Plotly Figures documentation page for more information.
• Added plotly.io.write_html and plotly.io.to_html functions for exporting figures to HTML (1474). Also available as .write_html and .to_html figure methods.
• Added new figure methods for batch updating figure properties (update_layout, update_traces, update_xaxes, etc.) (#1624). See the new Creating and Updating Figures documentation page for more details.
• Added support for all trace types in make_subplots (#1528)
• Added support for secondary y-axes in make_subplots (#1564)
• Support passing a scalar trace object (rather than a list or tuple of trace objects) as the data property to the Figure constructor (#1614)
• Added dictionary-stule .pop method to graph object classes (#1614)
• New jupyterlab-plotly JupyterLab extension for rendering figures in JupyterLab. Replaces the @jupyterlab/plotly-extension extension, and includes JupyterLab 1.0 support.
• Added new suite of built-in colorscales to the plotly.colors module, and support for specifying this wide range of colorscales by name. Also added support for specifying colorscales as a list of colors, in which case the color spacing is assumed to be uniform (#1647).
• Added sphinx-gallery renderer for embedding plotly figures in Sphinx-Gallery (#1577, plotly/plotly-sphinx-gallery).

Removed

• The follow modules for interfacing with the Chart Studio cloud service have been removed from plotly.py and moved to the new chart-studio distribution package. The following modules have been moved to a new top-level chart_studio module:
  • plotly.plotly -> chart_studio.plotly
  • plotly.api -> chart_studio.api
  • plotly.dashboard_objs -> chart_studio.dashboard_objs
  • plotly.grid_objs -> chart_studio.grid_objs
  • plotly.presentation_objs -> chart_studio.presentation_objs
• The legacy plotly.widgets.GraphWidget class for displaying online figures hosted by Chart Studio as ipywidgets has been removed. Please use the offline, and much more capable, plotly.graph_objects.FigureWidget class instead.
• The fileopt argument to chart_studio.plotly.plot has been removed, so in-place modifications to previously published figures are no longer supported, and a figure will always overwrite a figure with the same name.

Changed

• The 'plotly' template is used as the default theme across all figures.
• In order to reduce the size of the core plotly distribution package, the bundled geographic shape files used by the create_choropleth figure factory have been moved to a new optional plotly-geo distribution package (1604)
• For consistency with other figure factories, the create_choropleth and create_gantt figure factories now always returns Figure objects, rather than dictionaries (#1600, #1607).
• Figure add trace methods (.add_trace, .add_traces, .add_scatter, etc.) now return a reference to the calling figure, rather than the newly created trace (#1624)
• plotly.tools.make_subplots has been moved to plotly.subplots.make_subplots, though it is still available at the previous location for backward compatibility
• The plotly.graph_objs module has been moved to plotly.graph_objects, though it is still available at the previous location for backward compatibility (#1614)
• Trace uid properties are only generated automatically when a trace is added to a FigureWidget. When a trace is added to a standard Figure graph object the input uid, if provided, is accepted as is (#1580).
• datetime objects that include timezones are not longer converted to UTC (#1581)
• When a tuple property (e.g. layout.annotations) is updated with a list/tuple that is longer than the current value, the extra elements are appended to the end of the tuple.

Fixed

• Fixed visibility of bar trace error bars in built-in templates (1656)