[ckan-discuss] Improved preview support for resources

Tue Mar 29 11:28:35 BST 2011

Hi All,

Just wanted to let people know I've deployed a much improved version
of the data "preview". See it in action:

<http://ckan.net/package/japan-speedi-radiation-dose>
<http://ckan.net/package/econ-uk-house-prices-monthly>
<http://ckan.net/package/taxonconcept>

(One comment from having done this: we should tighten up on our
resource format description especially of 'nested formats' such as
zipped with csv -- these should be rendered as zip:csv no just csv --
see [1]).

[1]: http://wiki.ckan.net/Creating_and_editing_Packages#Nested_Formats

Improvements:

* More robust handling of csv's and xls (though we still have issues
with appspot timing out on large (e.g. > 500k) xls files)
* Plain text previewing of everything plain text
* Simple iframe support for html and anything else
* Nicer look to buttons and no display of buttons if preview won't
work (e.g. compressed files)
* More details: http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/962

Things I'd like to do next (and help wanted with):

* Recognizing and handling apis and services e.g. api/sparql google
docs, scraper wiki
 * E.g. for api/sparql we could create a little query box and let
people run queries
 * E.g. for google docs recognize the spreadsheet option and then talk
to their json API
* Providing a bit of a dashboard in the preview so you can e.g. see more rows
* Handling large (xls) files

Rufus