geom_bar bars not displaying when specifying ylim

Question

I'm having a problem with geom_bars wherein the bars are not rendered when I specify limits on the y-axis. I believe the following should reproduce the problem:

data <- structure(list(RoleCond = structure(c(1L, 1L, 2L, 2L), .Label = c("Buyer", "Seller"), class = "factor"),                     ArgCond = structure(c(1L, 2L, 1L, 2L), .Label = c("No Argument", "Argument"), class = "factor"),                     mean = c(2210.71428571429, 2142.70833333333, 2282.40740740741, 2346.2962962963),                     se = c(20.1231042081511, 16.7408757749718, 20.1471554637891, 15.708092540868)),                     .Names = c("RoleCond", "ArgCond", "mean", "se"), row.names = c(NA, -4L), class = "data.frame")  library(ggplot2)     ggplot(data=data, aes(fill=RoleCond, y=mean, x=ArgCond)) +        geom_bar(position="dodge", stat="identity") +        geom_errorbar(limits, position=dodge, width=0.1, size=.75) +        scale_y_continuous(limits=c(2000,2500)) 

which gives me this

The same code without the limits specified works fine. The geom_errorbar() doesn't seem to be related to the problem, but it does illustrate where the bars should be showing up.

I've tried using coord_cartesian(ylim=c(2000,2500)) which works for limiting the yaxis and getting the bars to display, but the axis labels get messed up and I don't understand what I'm doing with it.

Thanks for any suggestions! (I'm using R 2.15.0 and ggplot2 0.9.0)

Answer 1

You could try, with library(scales):

+ scale_y_continuous(limits=c(2000,2500),oob = rescale_none) 

instead, as outlined here.

Answer 2

Adding an answer for my case which was slightly different in case someone comes across this:

When using position="dodge", the bars get horizontally resized automatically to fill space that is often well beyond the limits of the data itself. As a result, even if both your x-axis and y-axis limits are limits=c(min-1, max+1, for certain data sets, the position="dodge" might resize it beyond that limit range, causing the bars to not appear. This might even occur if your limit floor is 0, unlike the case above.

Using oob=rescale_none in both scale_y_continous() AND scale_x_continuous() fixes this issue by simply cutting off the resizing done by position="dodge".

As per earlier comment, it requires package:scales so run library(scales) first.

Hope this helps someone else where the above answers only get you part way.