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ggplotly fails with geom_vline() with xintercept Date value

Trying to use ggplotly to graph time series data with a vertical line to indicate dates of interest.

Call fails with Error in Ops.Date(z[[xy]], 86400000) : * not defined for "Date" objects. I have tried unsuccessfully using both the latest CRAN and development versions of ggplot2 (as per plotly recommendation). Other SO questions (e.g., ggplotly and geom_bar when using dates - latest version of plotly (4.7.0)) do not address my concerns.

As illustrated below with plot object p - both ggplot and ggplotly work as expected. However, when a geom_vline() is added to the plot in p2, it only works correctly in ggplot, failing when calling ggplotly(p2). 

library(plotly)
library(ggplot2) 
library(magrittr)

set.seed(1)
df <- data.frame(date = seq(from = lubridate::ymd("2019-01-01"), by = 1, length.out = 10),
                 y = rnorm(10))

p <- df %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = date, y = y)) + 
  geom_line() 
p ## plots as expected
ggplotly(p) ## plots as expected

p2 <- p + geom_vline(xintercept = lubridate::ymd("2019-01-08"), linetype = "dashed")
p2 ## plots as expected
ggplotly(p2) ##fails
Solution

  • I just solved this using @Axeman's suggestion. In your case, you can just replace the date:

     lubridate::ymd("2019-01-01")

    becomes

     as.numeric(lubridate::ymd("2019-01-01"))

    Not pretty, but it works.