How to append nested svg elements to dom with d3.js

Question

I have looked around and it seems like this may not be possible but it would be amazing if you could use the selection capabilities of d3 to grab a whole chunk of svg markup and use it as the schema for a structure that you wanted to replicate several times. Example:

<g class='nice'>
<g class="slice">
    <path fill="#3182bd" d="M1.836909530733566e-15,-30A30,30 0 0,1 25.98076211353316,-14.999999999999995L0,0Z"></path>
    <text transform="translate(10.500000000000002,-18.186533479473212)" text-anchor="middle">bla2</text>
</g>
<g class="slice">
    <path fill="#6baed6" d="M25.98076211353316,-14.999999999999995A30,30 0 0,1 25.980762113533153,15.000000000000007L0,0Z"></path>
    <text transform="translate(21,4.6629367034256575e-15)" text-anchor="middle">bla</text>
</g>

would be much easier to just pop into your current enter loop rather than having to add the fill and d and transform attrs for each element like

.append('path')
.attr('transform', 'M25.98076211353316,-14.999999999999995A30,30 0 0,1 25.980762113533153,15.000000000000007L0,0Z')
.attr(.... etc etc etc

I guess I am wishing that d3 was more like jquery. Anyone have an idea of how you could do that?

Answer 1

When using d3 .html() method, watch out for innerHTML support for SVG elements (not supported in safari, IE).

You can, however, use innerSVG polyfill for same effect. See https://code.google.com/p/innersvg/ for details. It just works.

Use it like this:

D3Selection.append("g").node().innerSVG = "<circle class=...";

---

Better approach could be to introduce method for nesting desired structure on provided d3 selected element and use that. Eg.:

function appendCircles(group) { 
    group.append("circle").attr("class", "circle1");
    group.append("circle").attr("class", "circle2");
}

Answer 2

d3 has an .html() method and, although I haven't tried, I would expect it to work for creating <path> elements etc inside a group.

Of course that's not going to take care of setting the appropriate attributes of each element, but neither would anything that comes with jQuery core. For that, you'd want to use some templating library, like jade, or ICanHaz.