Update Button badly mixes legenditems of plot (`updatemenus`)
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Description
Hi, I´ve come across a weird thing:
I tried the plotly "Update Button" on a plot with a legend. At first everything seems as expected. But as soon as you toggle the plot with help of the update button, the legend is mixed in odd ways. Sometimes the legend even does not correspond to the data at all (e.g. change sensors to 4 in reprex).

Heres an example to play around
library(plotly)
df <- data.frame(
car = c(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2), # two cars
sensor = c(1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5), # with 5 sensors
x = c(1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2), # sensor data
y = c(2, 1, 3, 5, 6, 5, 3, 2, 1, 6, 7, 3, 8, 1, 5, 9, 2, 2, 5, 5)
)
updatemenus <- list(
list(
type = "buttons",
buttons = list(
list(
label = "Car 1",
method = "update",
args = list(list(visible = list(T, F)))),
list(
label = "Car 2",
method = "update",
args = list(list(visible = list(F, T))))
)
)
)
fig <- plot_ly(type = 'scatter', mode = "lines")
fig <- fig |> add_lines(~x, ~y, data = df[df$car == 1,], name = ~sensor)
fig <- fig |> add_lines(~x, ~y, data = df[df$car == 2,], name = ~sensor, visible = FALSE)
fig <- fig |> layout(
updatemenus = updatemenus,
legend = list(title = list(text = "<b> Sensor </b>"))
)
fig
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First steps
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- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by running the supplied R reprex with the plotly update buttons and varying the sensor count. Trace how the updatemenus visibility updates affect the legend, then verify that each button leaves legend items matching the currently visible data and that the existing example no longer shows mixed entries.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- r
- Domain
- data-visualization
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100