Welcome to Django Bingo!

Django Bingo is a collection of Django applications that together allows you to provide professional dashboards and 
(in the future) other types of reporting to your users. It is licensed under the BSD license, the same as Django.

Django Bingo isn't a full-blown "Business Intelligence" suite. Yet. It does allow you to plot your data into pretty
graphs, which is probably what most people see as BI. ETL, Data warehousing? You'll have to roll your own for now!

WARNING: This software is mostly a dump of ideas and code. It is neither neat nor secure. It might gobble up your kitten. 

==== Install to an existing project ====

 * Copy the following application directories to your project:

  - querybuilder
  - dashboard

 * Copy the media/dashboard directory to your own media directory (ie. it should be accessable via settings.MEDIA_URL). 
   This provides the various javascript libraries and css.

 * Add 'querybuilder' and 'dashboard' to your INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py. Also add 'django.contrib.auth' if you haven't
   yet done so as we use it for restricting access to your pretty dashboard.

 * Add the following URLs to your top-level url.py:

    (r'^querybuilder/', include('querybuilder.urls')),                       
    (r'^dashboard/', include('dashboard.urls')),
    (r'^accounts/login/$', 'django.contrib.auth.views.login'),
    (r'^accounts/logout/$', 'django.contrib.auth.views.logout_then_login'),
    (r'^accounts/profile/$', 'django.views.generic.simple.redirect_to', {'url': '/'}),

 * You can now access the Django Bingo dashboard:

    www.mydjangoinstall.com/dashboard/

 * By default you need to be logged in to view the dashboard. To enter design-mode and modify the dashboard you require
   a superuser account. In the future we'll do this via auth.permissions.

==== Use Django Bingo as a separate project ====

You might have noticed that Django Bingo includes a project of its own. This allows you to try out Django Bingo
directly, without having to install it to your existing project.

To use this project, either run python manage.py runserver or modify your web server to run Django Bingo via django.wsgi.
You will have to do a python manage.py syncdb first to initialize an SQLite database.

The following simple applications are provided so you can experiment right away:

  Ping - pings a number of hosts in a round-robin fashion and stores the responses. 
	 Add hosts to PingHosts via /admin/ping
	 To run: 'python action_daemon_ping.py'

  Status - stores various system status data
	 To run: 'python action_daemon_status.py'

You will need to run one of these scripts for a while to collect a bit of data. Plotting an empty database isn't fun.
You might need to modify the provided settings.py for your environment, YMMV. 

In the future we'll provide a pre-configured dashboard for both applications. For now, these are merely useful for
generating test-data.

Note: run do_env.sh to set up the 'env' virtualenv directory, very useful if you require multiple versions of Python
libraries. 

==== Setting up a dashboard automagically ====

The easiest way is to enter design-mode, add a dashboard and initialize it using the 
"Initialize dashboard from application" button. This provides a simple wizard to auto-configure a number of graphs
and tables for a selection of models. It probably isn't what you want, but it does set up a number of queries via
the Query Builder and hooks these up to elements in the Dashboard application. See it as a starting point for now.

==== Dashboard design mode ====

Drag-and-drop elements and hit 'Apply layout' to change your dashboard.

'Add element' to create a new Graph or Table. You'll probably need to set up a Data Selection for this element first.

Use the 'edit' link below each element to modify the element and its underlying Data Selection. 

==== Excel output ====

Included in contrib is the excellent xlwt library. Install it if you want Excel output, see querybuilder/excel.py for
details.

== Background ==

==== Query builder ====

The query builder application is used to set up queries (DataSelection objects) with which you can retrieve QuerySets
from other Django applications. It works without having to write any code, the configuration of a query is stored
directly in the database. 

Each DataSelection has a number of DataColumns. These are usually auto-generated from your Django application by
introspecting the models, but you can also specify your own (if you want). By calling 'get_data()' on your DataSelection
you obtain the QuerySet you specified.

You might have a Manager that you would like to use for your model. Query builder doesn't introspect Managers yet, but
if you specify a 'manager_method' for a DataSelection it will be used instead of 'Model.objects.all()'. In the future
query builder will become even smarter, for instance by allowing you to query databases without requiring a Django 
application associated to it.

==== Dashboard ====

The dashboard application uses Query Builder for generating graphs and tables. Various options are available for both
types of elements, and periodically refreshing elements is also possible. The Table element currently also provides
embedded mini-graphs, providing you with sparklines and barplots within a table.

In the future more types of elements will be available. 

== Further details ==

See docs for an overview and screenshots!

Contact me via email (alex-bingo at aperte dot nl) or check out aperte-it.com (my company website) and alextreme.org.