Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
139 lines (104 loc) · 4.46 KB

data-viewer.rst

File metadata and controls

139 lines (104 loc) · 4.46 KB
Raw

Data Viewer

The CKAN resource page can contain a preview of the resource's data. This works by either:

  1. Embedding the data into the page, either directly or by loading the data in an iframe.
  2. Using a custom widget (such as Recline) to view the data.

The decision as to which action to take is determined by the type of resource being viewed. In general, images will be directly embedded, unstructured or plain text files will be loaded in an iframe, and more complex data types will need to use a custom widget.

The data preview functionality that is provided by CKAN is described in the following sections:

These sections list the resource formats that each extension can preview and provide instructions for how to enable each extension. It is also possible for developers to create new extensions that can preview different types of resources. For more information on this topic see Writing Extensions.

Viewing images and text files

Configuration required: None. Images and text files (that match one of the file types given below) will be previewed automatically by default.

Resource formats: images, plain text (details below).

By default, the following types of resources will be embedded directly into the resource read page:

  • png
  • jpg
  • gif

The following types of resources will be loaded in an iframe:

  • plain
  • txt
  • html
  • htm
  • xml
  • rdf+xml
  • owl+xml
  • n3
  • n-triples
  • turtle
  • atom
  • rss

Viewing structured data: the Data Explorer

2.0 The recline_preview extension did not exist in previous versions of CKAN. The ability to embed Recline previews is not supported in the current version of CKAN.

Configuration required: The recline_preview extension must be added to ckan.plugins in your CKAN configuration file. This extension is part of CKAN and so does not need to be installed separately.

Resource formats: DataStore, csv, xls.

Structured data can be previewed using the Recline Data Explorer. The Data Explorer provides a rich, queryable view of the data, and allows the data to be filtered, graphed and mapped.

To be viewed, the data must either be:

  1. In the CKAN DataStore. This is the recommended way to preview structured data.

Or:

  1. In csv or xls format. In this case, CKAN will first have to try to convert the file into a more structured format by using the Dataproxy. This is an automatic process that does not require any additional configuration. However, as the resource must be downloaded by the Dataproxy service and then analysed before it is viewed, this option is generally slower and less reliable than viewing data that is in the DataStore.

Viewing JSON data

Configuration required: The json_preview extension must be added to ckan.plugins in your CKAN configuration file. If you wish to view external JSON resources as well, the resource_proxy extension must also be enabled. These extensions are part of CKAN and so do not need to be installed separately.

Resource formats: json, jsonp.

The json_preview extension provides previews of any JSON data that has been added to a CKAN instance (and so are stored in the Filestore). To view the data the resource format must be set to "json" or "jsonp" (case insensitive).

To also view remote JSON resources, the resource_proxy extension must be enabled as well (this is required in order to get around the same origin policy).

Viewing PDF documents

Configuration required: The pdf_preview extension must be added to ckan.plugins in your CKAN configuration file. This extension is part of CKAN and so does not need to be installed separately.

Resource formats: pdf, x-pdf, acrobat, vnd.pdf.

The pdf_preview extension provides previews of any pdf documents that have been added to a CKAN instance (and so are stored in the Filestore) as well as any external pdf documents.