Plotly: handling missing values with animated chart - r

Question

I found out that when using animated plotly chart you need to have the same number of observations for each of your factors. Meaning -> one missing observation results in whole trace being discarded for entire duration of the animated chart. That is especially a problem when you use time-series data and some of your traces start later, or end sooner than others. Is there any workaround beside of imputing null values for the missings? Thanks!
Crossposting from rstudio community
Example:
library(gapminder)
library(plotly)
library(dplyr)
#working example with no missings
gapminder %>%
group_by(year, continent) %>%
summarise(pop = mean(pop), gdpPercap = mean(gdpPercap), lifeExp = mean(lifeExp)) %>%
plot_ly( x = ~gdpPercap,
y = ~lifeExp,
size = ~pop,
color = ~continent,
frame = ~year,
text = ~continent,
hoverinfo = "text",
type = 'scatter',
mode = 'markers')
#filtering one row results in missing Africa trace for entirety of the plot
gapminder %>%
group_by(year, continent) %>%
summarise(pop = mean(pop), gdpPercap = mean(gdpPercap), lifeExp = mean(lifeExp)) %>%
filter(gdpPercap > 1253) %>%
plot_ly( x = ~gdpPercap,
y = ~lifeExp,
size = ~pop,
color = ~continent,
frame = ~year,
text = ~continent,
hoverinfo = "text",
type = 'scatter',
mode = 'markers')

Answer 1

There seems to be no direct way to solve this problem. Indirectly, the problem with NAs in dataframe can be solved by using ggplot + ggplotly instead of plotly (see this answer). Moreover, when there is an incomplete dataset as per my example, instead of NAs in some rows, it can be solved by using complete function from the tidyverse package.
See the solution:
p <-
gapminder %>%
group_by(year, continent) %>%
summarise(pop =
mean(pop), gdpPercap = mean(gdpPercap), lifeExp = mean(lifeExp)) %>%
filter(gdpPercap > 1253) %>%
complete(continent,year) %>%
ggplot(aes(gdpPercap, lifeExp, color = continent)) +
geom_point(aes(frame = year)) + theme_bw()
ggplotly(p)
That being said, I am not a fan of workarounds when used in production, so feel free to inform me about the development in plotly animate function.