---
title: Creating a visualization extension using D3
lastUpdate: "2015-05-29"
draft: true
tags:
---

If you have a look at some of the visualization extensions published on branch.qlik.com, you'll recognize that quite a lot of them are based on D3 and the idea of bringing a new chart type into Qlik Sense.
First of all it should be mentioned that the concept of visualization extensions is certainly perfect to bring new chart types into Qlik Sense, but it is not limited only to this scenario!
In later chapters we'll evaluate also other concepts, e.g. communicating with other (web-)services, processes and systems.

## Are we ready?
Yes, absolutely. In previous chapters you have learned everything which is necessary to create a D3 based visualization extension.
It certainly helps for this chapter to have some basic understanding of D3, but you'll see that this is - in many cases not even necessary!

### What is D3?
Before we dig into details, let me introduce you to D3:


## The Basics - Let's choose a chart
First of all you need to now which chart type you want to include. There are several great resources out there where you can browse through existing examples.
If you've found what you are looking for I recommend the following approach:

1) Get the chart working locally
2) Get an example running on your local machine
3) Integrate the example into Qlik Sense
4) Make your chart configurable

## Our D3 based chart - a "Step Chart"

### Get the chart working locally
Before I start incorporating a D3 based chart into a Qlik Sense visualization extension, I always try to get the code working locally. This is one of my "golden rules" ;-) In the past I spent just too much time getting a D3 chart to work within a visualization extension, but then I realized that tha D3 based solution itself was not working, so in the end I just wasted a lot of time.

### Get the example running