ODS-Widgets is a library of web components that can be used to build rich and interactive pages of datavisualization, live from data available on a remote API.
In more concrete terms, it is a set of AngularJS directives that can be directly plugged on a remote data API (currently OpenDataSoft only); those directives can interact with each others using shared contexts (for example a "calendar" directive could refine the data displayed by a "table" directive). It is designed to work without the need for a local backend, and to be efficient to build data visualization pages and dashboards by just manipulating HTML markup (AngularJS directive tags). Since it is regular HTML, it can be integrated in your current pages, supports CSS styling, and generally works in a way that will feel familiar if you know HTML. It does not require knowing AngularJS to be used.
This library is used in production as a part of the OpenDataSoft platform, a Software-as-a-Service data portal. It is essentially the current core of our front-end data visualization features.
Here are a few ideas of things you could do with all this:
- integrate a simple visualization (or a more complete visualization tool using more widgets) from a public dataset into a blog article (it is worth noting that, as more and more search engines are understanding JS applications like Google is, your integrated visualizations will be referenced, which can be very beneficial to your SEO)
- within your application, allow your users to design and build complex and interactive dashboard or visualization pages on your data, using simple HTML tags (that's what we are doing, for example)
- build a website on top of your data (or public data) without having to worry about consuming and exposing your data to end-users in a scalable and compelling way
- fork and enrich this toolset with your own widgets, or even adapt it to your own needs and backend services: the project is licensed under the MIT license
Let's show a map of the restaurants near our former office in Paris. The data can be browsed on http://public.opendatasoft.com/explore/dataset/restaurants_a_proximite_de_pepiniere_27/
<!-- Expose a "dataset context" from the data -->
<ods-dataset-context context="restaurants" restaurants-domain="public.opendatasoft.com" restaurants-dataset="restaurants_a_proximite_de_pepiniere_27">
<!-- Display a map from the data exposed from this context -->
<ods-map context="restaurants"></ods-map>
</ods-dataset-context>There is a complete tutorial to help you build your first page around a simple example. Since it is build on public data, you can reproduce it by yourself and even use it as a basis for your first project.
There is a complete reference documentation of all the available directives and all the parameters they support. It also contains more literature on the technical details of the library.
Known to work on: (may not be exhaustive)
- Internet Explorer 9+
- Safari 6+
- Chrome 12+
- Firefox 4+
- Android Browser from Android 3.0+
You can download the latest ODS Widgets release here. This is a ZIP file of a folder that you can then copy into your project.
The following libraries are required as dependencies in your pages for ODS-Widgets to work:
- jQuery (1.6+ should work) (note: we're looking to remove this dependency in the future)
- AngularJS 1.2.* and the angular-sanitize module
- Some widgets are using icons from FontAwesome 3.2.1 (note: we're looking to remove this dependency in the future)
To load ODS-Widgets, you can then simply load ods-widgets.js and ods-widgets.css.
Some specific widgets can rely on specific "heavy" libraries (such as Highcharts, Leaflet...); in that case, they are lazily-loaded from a CDN when the widget initializes itself.
ODS-Widgets require an AngularJS app to run, which can for example be done with a simple ng-app="ods-widgets":
<body>
<div ng-app="ods-widgets">
<!-- Within this div, we are in an Angular app where ODS-Widgets tags will run -->
{{ "hello" + "from" + "angular!"}}
</div>
</body>Currently, ODS-Widgets only works with an API from an OpenDataSoft domain, or any API that exposes the same interface and returns the same JSON result.
This project originates from OpenDataSoft codebase, and as such obviously works closely with our own interfaces; however, we are looking to make this framework work with more APIs and services (and thankfully, AngularJS can make it easier), for example by implementing more AngularJS services as sources, beside our ODSAPI service. If you have an API that exposes structured data in a way that looks like our widgets could display it, and you want to try to make it work with it, you can contact us.
This software library is licensed under the MIT license.
If you have questions, you can contact us on Twitter (@opendatasoft) or simply open a GitHub issue.