Visualizing Data in React Native: A Guide to Charting Libraries
When building apps that rely on data, presenting it in an engaging and easy-to-understand format is crucial. This is where charting libraries come into play. In this tutorial, we’ll explore React Native Chart Kit, a popular charting library for React Native, and build a finance tracking app to demonstrate its capabilities.
Building the Finance Tracking App
Our app will have four screens: three for user input and one for displaying charts. We’ll focus on the reports screen, which will feature three types of charts: pie, bar, and line charts.
Setting Up the Project
To get started, create a new React Native project and install the required packages, including React Navigation, React Native Paper, and React Native Chart Kit. You can find the full list of dependencies in the package.json file.
Creating the Charts
We’ll start by creating the pie chart component, which will display the transaction types, expense types, income types, savings types, and investment types. We’ll use the PieChart component from React Native Chart Kit and customize it with a legend component for better flexibility.
Next, we’ll create the bar chart component, which will display the monthly income and expenses. We’ll configure the chart to use half of the available width and specify the fill shadow gradient and opacity.
Finally, we’ll create the line chart component, which will compare income, savings, and investments over time. This component will accept multiple datasets and feature a custom legend.
Getting the Data
To populate our charts, we’ll need to retrieve data from our SQLite database using the React Native SQLite storage library. We’ll create methods to get the transactions grouped by type, expense categories, income categories, savings categories, and investment categories.
Putting it All Together
Once we have our data, we’ll update the state values and render the charts with the corresponding data. We’ll also add conditions to show each chart based on the user’s selection.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we’ve learned how to use React Native Chart Kit to create different types of charts in React Native. By following along, you should now have a basic understanding of how to integrate charting libraries into your React Native apps. Check out the full source code of the app in its GitHub repo for more information.