[Question] Decoupled UI

[lucasconstantino]

I'm a front-end developer, and am starting to work on a project which uses lots of data visualization. It has a backend already built on Python. My client likes Dash and the easiness the tool provides for data engineers to ship new visualizations. But, the project consists of many other features besides data visualizations, and those features would be much easier to implement if I had full control over the React application.

I'm trying to figure out a way to let backend developers use Dash to define visualization, but integrate them in a completely decoupled UI, also built on top of React.

Is this supported, or does anyone knows of sample code to achieve something similar?

Thanks

[alexcjohnson]

This is a tricky situation. Dash definitely wants to be the ringmaster.

You could package the rest of your front end as one or more specialized dash components https://github.com/plotly/dash-component-boilerplate. That would give the tightest integration between the datavis parts and the rest of the UI, but it requires using dash callbacks for communication between parts. Internal to any given specialized component you can do whatever kind of state management you want. And we do now have client-side callbacks #672 so your cross-component communication would not necessarily have to go through Python.

If that won't work, the only things I can think of are

• Insert dash apps as iframes
• Pull the results of the engineers' dash work out and remake the graphs in https://github.com/plotly/react-plotly.js. If there are some parameters that go into creating these graphs and you want to take over the UI for choosing those parameters but still use the dash back end to generate the figure, you could probably use the _dash-update-component endpoint - mimicking the request we generate in dash-renderer to retrieve the figure from Python.

[lucasconstantino]

@alexcjohnson thanks very much for the overview and ideas! Me and my team have been working on this since yesterday, we forked dash-renderer and managed to build some interesting interfaces for a decoupled experience. We'll try and give all this back to the community soon enough ;)

[lucasconstantino]

@alexcjohnson I would love if you could have a look at the effort so far: plotly/dash-renderer/pull/173

[gvwilson]

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