What's the best way to make a d3.js visualisation layout responsive?

There's another way to do this that doesn't require redrawing the graph, and it involves modifying the viewBox and preserveAspectRatio attributes on the <svg> element:

<svg id="chart" width="960" height="500"
  viewBox="0 0 960 500"
  preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet">
</svg>

Update 11/24/15: most modern browsers can infer the aspect ratio of SVG elements from the viewBox, so you may not need to keep the chart's size up to date. If you need to support older browsers, you can resize your element when the window resizes like so:

var aspect = width / height,
    chart = d3.select('#chart');
d3.select(window)
  .on("resize", function() {
    var targetWidth = chart.node().getBoundingClientRect().width;
    chart.attr("width", targetWidth);
    chart.attr("height", targetWidth / aspect);
  });

And the svg contents will be scaled automatically. You can see a working example of this (with some modifications) here: just resize the window or the bottom right pane to see how it reacts.

Look for 'responsive SVG' it is pretty simple to make a SVG responsive and you don't have to worry about sizes any more.

Here is how I did it:

d3.select("div#chartId")
   .append("div")
   .classed("svg-container", true) //container class to make it responsive
   .append("svg")
   //responsive SVG needs these 2 attributes and no width and height attr
   .attr("preserveAspectRatio", "xMinYMin meet")
   .attr("viewBox", "0 0 600 400")
   //class to make it responsive
   .classed("svg-content-responsive", true); 

The CSS code:

.svg-container {
    display: inline-block;
    position: relative;
    width: 100%;
    padding-bottom: 100%; /* aspect ratio */
    vertical-align: top;
    overflow: hidden;
}
.svg-content-responsive {
    display: inline-block;
    position: absolute;
    top: 10px;
    left: 0;
}

More info / tutorials:

http://demosthenes.info/blog/744/Make-SVG-Responsive

http://soqr.fr/testsvg/embed-svg-liquid-layout-responsive-web-design.php

I've coded up a small gist to solve this.

The general solution pattern is this:

1. Breakout the script into computation and drawing functions.
2. Ensure the drawing function draws dynamically and is driven of visualisation width and height variables (The best way to do this is to use the d3.scale api)
3. Bind/chain the drawing to a reference element in the markup. (I used jquery for this, so imported it).
4. Remember to remove it if it's already drawn. Get the dimensions from the referenced element using jquery.
5. Bind/chain the draw function to the window resize function. Introduce a debounce (timeout) to this chain to ensure we only redraw after a timeout.

I also added the minified d3.js script for speed. The gist is here: https://gist.github.com/2414111

jquery reference back code:

$(reference).empty()
var width = $(reference).width();

Debounce code:

var debounce = function(fn, timeout) 
{
  var timeoutID = -1;
  return function() {
     if (timeoutID > -1) {
        window.clearTimeout(timeoutID);
     }
   timeoutID = window.setTimeout(fn, timeout);
  }
};

var debounced_draw = debounce(function() {
    draw_histogram(div_name, pos_data, neg_data);
  }, 125);

 $(window).resize(debounced_draw);

Enjoy!