[ckan-dev] Work on the ckanext-datapreview plugin

Wed Jul 13 11:07:51 UTC 2011

Hi all,

I'm just posting a quick update on some work I'm doing on the data preview
CKAN plugin (https://bitbucket.org/okfn/ckanext-datapreview).

I've fixed a couple of minor issues with the plugin not handling failed
requests to the data proxy API (as illustrated here
http://thedatahub.org/package/fukushima-radiation-monitoring-greenpeace) as
well as the formatting of the error messages. I've added these fixes in a
separate fork of the project which can be found on Bitbucket,
https://bitbucket.org/aron_/ckanext-datapreview.

I'm now looking into implementing the ability to create graphs from CSV data
and could do with some advice on various issues.

1. How to generate the graphs? It seems to me the best way to create useful
graphs is to get users to generate them via a simple creation tool similar
to the one on socrata.com.
2. How to store the graphs? Can they be saved alongside the resource data in
CKAN?
3. Where to find test data? Currently most of the CSV data is archived in
zip or tar files and currently inaccessible so I'm having trouble finding
useful data that can be actually be plotted on a graph. If anyone has any
suggestions for test datasets I'd be extremely grateful.

So from here I'm going to try and add a widget to the data preview lightbox
that creates a simple line graph from selected columns and move from there.
If anyone has any suggestions for features that they'd like to see
implemented I'd love to hear them.

Cheers,
Aron
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