[GitHub] [superset] rusackas commented on pull request #19038: feat: improve color consistency

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rusackas commented on PR #19038:
URL: https://github.com/apache/superset/pull/19038#issuecomment-1108088690

   Heya @clausherther and @serenajiang - thanks for raising your concerns. This is an intricate problem, but I'm confident we can find a sensible way forward so everyone gets what they want here. There are pros and cons to pretty much any approach, which I'll attempt to lay out here.
   
   As a bit of a side note, we sometimes find `label_colors` to be an imperfect solution since (a) drill-down/up/across are coming, and across-the-board consistency will be of increasing importance, (b) we saw cases where people make a particular series a specific color from the palette, and then a neighboring line or pie slice was _also_ assigned to be that color, and (c) as a feature, it's a little buried and cumbersome in general for wide adoption.
   
   So... i think I see a couple paths forward, with varying levels of difficulty. Here goes...
   
   1) Add an app configuration (or dare I say Feature Flag?) for `USE_ANALAGOUS_COLORS_IN_DASHBOARDS` which, when enabled, would act as it does today. If you turn it off, it would simply loop through the palette colors repeatedly. Default of that config is up for debate.
     * `True` would mean it works like it does today, generating colors as needed:
       * Upsides:
         * Unique color per-series, meaning there will be fewer issues disambiguating charts
         * Features like cross-filters (added support for this nascent feature coming soon) and drill-down/up/across will be visually coherent
       * Downsides:
         * Depending on size of dashboard and number of series in it, there may be a proliferation of colors
     * `False` would mean the dashbpard cycles repeatedly through the specified color palette.
       * Upsides:
         * Only official pallete colors get used
       * Downsides: 
         * You may see the same color multiple times in a chart (depending on the number of series in the chart vs the number of colors in the palette
         * A color may be assigned (via `label_coors` or naturally) the identical color as its neighbor, causing confusion
         * A given series in a dashbard will have a consistent color, but not a unique color, so it may be ambiguous or misleading in some use cases
       
   2) This is a less appealing idea since it has many potential issues, but we have heard of use cases for it, so here goes... we _could_ add another configuration option for `CONSISTENT_SERIES_COLORS_IN_DASHBOARDS` which defaults to `True` to support either of the above treatments. If set to `False` however, the dashboard would ignore chart-to-chart consistency entirely, and just start at the beginning of the color palette in each chart. Then the first color in the palette (sometimes a brand color) is always the first color selected for a chart, and thus the dominant color in many dashboards. 
   
   Hope this helps, and hope we can steer this so that everyone wins :D


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