[Feature request]: change height sizing policy of plotly htmlwidget to 100%

[vttrifonov]

Can we change the default widget height sizing policy set in as_widget to 100%. Right now it is 400px and this makes it hard to make a plot to fill its container along the height.

For example, I am hoping to use the following simplified example to change my plot to height 5in. It does not work (for me), because the style of the resulting htmlwidget is set to the default "400px"

tags$div(style="width: 100%; height: 5in", 
  plot_ly(x=1, y=1, type="scatter", mode="markers")
)

The following on the other hand does the job.

tags$div(style="width: 100%; height: 5in", 
   plot_ly(x=1, y=1, type="scatter", mode="markers") %T>% {
     .$sizingPolicy$defaultHeight<-"100%"
 }
)

It seems to me that a default height of "100%", like the default for width, makes more sense (allowing for the container to control the size) than the arbitrary "400px" used right now.

I really would like to control the height of my plots in a R markdown html document and this was the only solution I could come up with: R plotly seems to deal fine with "px" units, but setting inches and % did not work. Perhaps I am missing something...

[cpsievert]

To be honest, I'm pretty sure I copied that default from leaflet. Perhaps @jcheng5 could shed some light on why that's probably a better default

[jcheng5]

If you set the height to 100% and the parent element is NOT absolutely sized, nothing will show up at all. Therefore, most htmlwidgets default to an absolute height, and you pass height="100%" explicitly if you want that. (I don't know why plot_ly doesn't accept inches or % though.)

[jcheng5]

That said, ideally I'd like to figure out a way for widgets to have default heights that depend on their parent containers. Not yet sure if it's possible.

[vttrifonov]

OK. It is a bummer that plotly.js does not let you specify %/in: my main issue is that I wanted to specify "in" for the plotly height and, surprisingly to me, setting in the container was the only way I figured out to do this. plotly.js has layout.autosize and config.responsive but I am not sure how they fit into R plotly, because of the htmlwidgets wrapper and its fixed height ... It seems that until plotly.js lets us use other units I am stuck with what I have now (setting the sizingPolicy of the plot_ly htmlwidget)