dashboard

Research dashboard for Indigeneity/Urban Ecology courses

The research dashboard is built with Plotly Dash, which is a handy Python framework for building data visualizations. It also utilizes django-plotly-dash to embed the Plotly Dash app(s) into the Django framework, In order to implement other features in the future, read our cookbook entry to see how to adapt a dashboard app to Django.

Notes: The package django-plotly-dash requires Django>=2.0, Python>=3.5, Dash<=0.38.0 (they have not developed the package for greater versions as of May 2019).

Skeleton of this project

dashboard/Django_Dash
|--- Django_Dash/ ## regular Django project directory which contains setting.py and wsgi.py
|
|--- Django_Dash_app/
|   |
|   |--- dashplotly/ ## the directory for Plotly Dash app(s)
|   |    |
|   |    |--- csv/ ## saving dataset
|   |    |
|   |    |--- dashboard_app.py ## the main program
|   |    |
|   |    |--- uniqueYearCalculator.py
|   | 
|   |--- migrations/
|   | 
|   |--- other files for regular Django apps
|
|--- static/css/
|
|--- templates/
|
|--- manage.py ## run the project as regular Django apps
|
|--- requirement.txt

Runserver locally

Technically, this project is still a Django app. To run it, go to dashboard/Django_Dash/ directory and do:

python manage.py runserver

Update data source

1. Download the spreadsheet as CSV format and save it in dashboard/Django_Dash/Django_Dash_app/dashplotly/csv/ directory
2. Clean up the data
   2-1. Make sure the first row of the spreadsheet is the one of headers
   2-2. Delete the columns you do not want to show in the app (e.g. the columns marking the progress of editing data)
3. Go to dashboard/Django_Dash/Django_Dash_app/dashplotly/dashboard_app.py and update the name of the newest spreadsheet in the following code ( which is the first line of the program after importing libraries is done)

   df = pd.read_csv('Django_Dash_app/dashplotly/csv/<name-of-your-spreadsheet>.csv') 
   

4. Run the server and check if anything goes off. Adjust either the program or the spreadsheet accordingly.