dashboard-js is a lightweight javascript library built for quickly creating dashboards using data packaged data sources. If you need to visualize and present data in a convenient way and you need to do that fast then dashboard-js is a library for you. There are many advantages to dashboard-js:

• It requires only basic knowledge of HTML, CSS
• It's modular and extendable through the use of widgets
• It's lightweight, fast to include and to begin with

Getting started

Installation

Simply import bundled dashboard-js code inside of your HTML file:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://combinatronics.com/datopian/dashboard-js/master/build/static/js/main.js"></script>

Setup your Dashboard

Your dashboard will consist of one or more widgets. You'll need to have placeholder element for each widget and reference it by id in the config:

<div id='testWidget'></div>

Widget configuration

To start working with widgets you need to set up config global variable available from window.config where you can specify how the dashboard should be rendered:

var config = {
  widgets: [...],
  datasets: [...]
}

• widgets - a list of objects where each object contains information about where a widget should be injected and how it should look like.
• datasets - a list of dataset URLs.

A standard widget object should have the following structure:

{
  "elementId": "testWidget",
  "view": {
    "title": "",
    "legend": "",
    "footer": "",
    "resources": [
      {
        "datasetId": "",
        "name": "",
        "transform": []
      }
    ],
    "specType": "",
    "spec": {

    }
  }
}

where:

• elementId - is "id" of the attribute you want to use as a container of your widget.
• view - descriptor of a view (widget).
  • title, legend, footer - these are optional metadata.
  • resources - a list of resources needed for a widget and required manipulations (transforms).
    • datasetId - the id (name) of the dataset from which the resource is extracted.
    • name - name of the resource.
    • transform - transformations required for a resource.
  • specType - type of a widget, e.g., vega or figure.
  • spec - specification for selected widget type.

Figure widget

A specification for "Figure widget" would have the following structure:

{
  "fieldName": "",
  "suffix": "",
  "prefix": ""
}

where "suffix" and "prefix" attributes are optional. The "fieldName" attribute will be used to extract specific value from a row. In this example we extract the latest data and display it as a "Figure" widget - https://github.com/datopian/dashboard-js/tree/master/example.

Vega widget

You can find information about Vega here: https://datahub.io/docs/features/views#vega-graphs

Example

You can find basic example of how to use dashboard-js here - https://github.com/datopian/dashboard-js/tree/master/example

More complex example

One of the good examples of projects built using dashboard-js is the London - City Dashboard a free and open data-sharing portal where anyone can access data related to London. See the code here - https://github.com/datahq/city-indicators.

How it works

sequenceDiagram

Browser->>DashboardJS: config
DashboardJS->>DataJS: identifier (URL to dataset)
DataJS->>DashboardJS: compiled data package
DashboardJS->>DatapackageRender: view + compiled data package
DatapackageRender->>DashboardJS: compiled view
DashboardJS-->>DashboardJS: render Vega or Figure component
DashboardJS->>Browser: Figure or Vega chart

Datasets, packages, resources, Oh My!

"A data package can contain multiple resources" == "A dataset can contain multiple files"

Noteable Dependencies

Dashboard-js is built on the following core dependencies:

• data.js - https://github.com/datopian/data.js
• datapackage-render - https://github.com/frictionlessdata/datapackage-render-js
• transforms - https://github.com/frictionlessdata/datapackage-render-js/blob/master/lib/transform.js

Maintenance

This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.

First of all, install dependencies:

npm install or yarn

In the project directory, you can run:

npm start

Runs the app in the development mode. Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

npm test

Launches the test runner in the interactive watch mode.

npm run build

Build the app for production into a single file /build/static/js/main.js.