Consistent Pie Colors

[cawoodm (Marc)]

I find my self almost daily adapting the colors of buckets in my pie charts. They keep changing "magically".

In one example it's just different between a pie in the dashboard and that same visualisation viewed on it's own.

Dashboard:

Visualization:

Yes, I do click save each time I change colors.

Is there method to this madness?

1. Are colors stored separately between dashboard and vis?
2. When are colors automagically "reset"? I know they are but I don't see a clear pattern!
3. What are colors bound to? Text?

[timroes]

Hi Marc,

you asked exactly the right questions I assume:

1. Colors are indeed stored separately between vis and dashboard, or more clearly: The colors when being in vis editor will be stored with the visualization. If you place it now on a dashboard the chart should have the same colors. If you change the colors on the dashboard and save the dashboard, those colors are now stored with the dashboard, and overwrite the colors of the vis. So making further changes to the vis colors won't update the colors used on THIS dashboard. I am still not 100% convinced by that behavior and we have an ongoing discussion about what we actually want that behavior to be, to be the least confusing (and still fulfill the wishes users were asking for).

2. Colors should never be automagically reseted actually, but we are aware that there is a bug in the color selection, that seems to be specific to pie charts: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/13653

3. Yeah the text that will be shown in the legend, so changing that text will always change the colors.

I hope that answers could clarify a bit on the behavior of colors.

Cheers,
Tim

[cawoodm (Marc)]

Thanks for the clarification. That explains some of what I am seeing though I do suspect a bug somewhere due to "magical" changes.

For my part I would prefer to globally map certain texts to colors. I always want category: ERROR to be red, category: WARNING to be orange etc. I always want type: customer to be blue and type: user to be light blue.

So maybe that's an idea for some sort of global dictionary of palette colors.

[timroes]

Please feel free to file a feature request in our repositories for a global color dictionary. I have looked shortly and it seems we don't have a feature request for that yet.