Updating your charts to reflect real-time data is an essential part of building interactive dashboards. ECharts offers flexible techniques for dynamically updating both the data and the configuration options of your charts, ensuring that users always see the most current information. When you want your charts to respond to streaming data, user actions, or periodic data refreshes, you can use the ECharts API to update the chart instance without re-initializing the entire chart. This is typically done by calling the setOption method on the chart instance and passing new data or updated options. The setOption method intelligently merges the new options with the existing configuration, making it highly efficient for live updates.

To implement real-time updates, you might fetch new data from a server at regular intervals or subscribe to a data stream. Once new data arrives, you simply update the relevant fields in your chart's options and call setOption again. This approach avoids unnecessary re-renders and preserves user interactions such as zoom or selection. You can also animate transitions between old and new data for a smooth visual experience. Using JavaScript timers, such as setInterval, is a common way to simulate or handle periodic updates in a dashboard environment.