[Lens] For very small values XY axis can get many many zeros

[dej611]

Describe the bug:

Divide a value by a very number in Lens (i.e. in formula with 1/BIG NUMBER HERE) to see the Y axis act in a weird way with the formatting.
I've discovered this while testing #143632 and later reproduced with static values.

Expected behavior:

Avoid 0 duplicates - it's strange that the precision increases up to a point where it gets reduced to a simple 0
In general a better formatting strategy for this cases should be found.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-vis-editors @elastic/kibana-vis-editors-external (Team:VisEditors)

[flash1293]

I'm not sure whether this is a Kibana or an elastic-charts bug - don't we have some logic in place to extend the axis in these situations to get different ticks @markov00 ? Maybe I'm misremembering...

[flash1293]

marking as blocked for now until @markov00 had the chance to check it out :)

[markov00]

This is caused by your formatting function used.
We don't call the axis formatted function with duplicate values, but we call it with specific subdivisions of the axis (in this case from 0 to 1/100000....)
In this case, it seems that the formatted is working fine up to 3/4 decimal points and then everything smaller is transformed to a no-decimal. Looks like a Numeraljs behavior:

numeral(0.01).format('0.[00]');  // === 0.01
numeral(0.001).format('0.[00]');  // === 0
numeral(0.0000001).format('0.[00]'); // NaN and in this case I think the code instead renders the number with a simple toString 1e-7

I don't think we should remove the duplicate zeros internally in charts, instead, we should take back ownership of the axis tick formatting and deliver the optimal representation every time. We should use the field formatters only in the tooltip, where the user requires the a particular precision. We could just provide a way to define prefix/postfix or the type of notation to use when formatting the axes values.

[flash1293]

I don't think we should remove the duplicate zeros internally in charts, instead, we should take back ownership of the axis tick formatting and deliver the optimal representation every time. We should use the field formatters only in the tooltip, where the user requires the a particular precision. We could just provide a way to define prefix/postfix or the type of notation to use when formatting the axes values

Yeah, that's the bigger plan here. I think it makes sense to just block it on that for now.

[flash1293]

Thanks for taking a look!

[markov00]

I think it makes sense to just block it on that for now.

what do you mean? that we should the deduplication feature in elastic charts? I'm more on the idea to fix the field formatter logic in this case.

[markov00]

because the problem is not just at the axis level, but also on the tooltip that is showing the wrongly formatted value as zero

[flash1293]

Sorry, didn't state that clearly. I meant rewriting the formatting so we don't get a blackbox number formatter based on numeral.js but a config object based on a standard that can be used more intelligently by all the places applying it: #102239