Building Dynamic Dashboards with Django and D3

Clinton Dreisbach

Monday 11 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
Audience level: Intermediate or Advanced

Description

Django and D3.js make a powerful combination for building dashboards to let people drill down into their own data. We'll walk through an emergency services dashboard built with the two and show how to make them work most effectively together, and how to stretch the Django ORM to accommodate the queries we'll need.

Abstract

Django does a great job of building dynamic web applications, but it's not always clear how to use it for a single-page JavaScript-driven application like a data dashboard. We will walk through a dashboard built with Django for emergency services data and dig into the following questions.

  • How do I serve data up to my dashboard? We'll show how the Django REST Framework can make this easy.
  • How do I allow deep linking to particular queries on my dashboard? We'll use django-url-filter to transform a URL hash into a database query.
  • How do I get statistical calculations like quartiles out of Django? We'll stretch the Django ORM to use PostgreSQL's powerful statistics functions.
  • How do I make all of this work with D3? We'll have a brief survey of how D3 works and see how to plug data from Django into it.

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