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Coloring individual columns of a column chart (Google Visualization)

Now before i get into the nuts and bolts of my problem. I must confess that i was quite skeptical about the google charts API, mainly because of using the mostly awesome Jfreecharts in the past. However having used it for a bit now, i am warming up to the idea of it, because quite frankly it is much simpler to use. You are likely to have a "cool" looking chart with tooltips etc in a much shorter time when compared to JFreeCharts.

Anyway so about my problem, recently i was asked to create a column chart such that each column is colored differently.  My data looked something like this

  var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable([
    ['Year', 'Games Finished'],
    ['2003',  12],
    ['2004',  6],
    ['2005',  15],
  ]);


The problem with this was that each column in the column chart is the same color,  you see it seems like the google charts API assigns a color per column. So one of the workarounds i.e. a hack for this was to represent the data as an adjacency matrix and exploit the stacking functionality of the column charts. In the adjacency matrix the values for each data point will be across the diagonal, and everything else would be 0. What i mean is the data should be  structured like this

 function drawVisualization() {
  var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable([
    ['Year', '2003', '2004', '2005'],
    ['2003',  12,0,0],
    ['2004',  0,6,0],
    ['2005',  0,0,15],
  ]);
  new google.visualization.ColumnChart(document.getElementById('visualization')).
      draw(data,
           {title:"Games Finished per Year",
            width:600, height:400,
            hAxis: {title: "Year"},
            vAxis:{title:"Games Finished"},
            isStacked:true}
      );
}

This solution isnt perfect, but it is a solution none the less.  You can give it a go in the Google visualization playground.

I will write a follow up post (at some point) with a function that will take two js arrays and build a dataTable object which will be an adj matrix of the data in the arrays.

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