Google Visualisation API Controls Support Interactive Data Queries Within a Web Page

The only way I can keep up with updates to Google warez at the moment is to feed off tips, tricks and noticings shared by @mhawksey. Yesterday, Martin pointed put to me a couple of new controls offered by the Google visualization API – interactive dashboard controls (documentation), and an in-page chart editor.

What the interactive components let you do is download a dataset from a Google spreadsheet and then dynamically filter the data within the page.

So for example, over on the F1Datajunkie blog I’ve been posting links to spreadsheets containing timing data from recent Formula One races. What I can now do is run a query on one of the spreadsheets to pull down particular data elements into the web page, and then filter the results within the page using a dynamic control. An example should make that clear (unfortunately, I can’t embed a live demo in this hosted WordPress blog page:-(

I’ve posted a copy of the code used to generate that example as gist here: Google Dynamic Chart control, feeding off Google Spreadsheet/visualisation API query

Here’s the key code snippet – the ControlWrapper populates the control using the unique data elements found in a specified column (by label) within the downloaded dataset, and is then bound to a chart type which updates when the control is changed:

  var data = response.getDataTable();
  var namePicker = new google.visualization.ControlWrapper({
    'controlType': 'CategoryFilter',
    'containerId': 'filter_div',
    'options': {
      'filterColumnLabel': 'driver',
      'ui': {
        'labelStacking': 'vertical',
        'allowTyping': false,
        'allowMultiple': false    
      }
    }
  });

  var laptimeChart = new google.visualization.ChartWrapper({
    'chartType': 'LineChart',
    'containerId': 'chart_div',
    'options': {
      'width': 800,
      'height': 800
    }
  });
  
  var dashboard = new google.visualization.Dashboard(document.getElementById('dashboard_div')).
    bind(namePicker, laptimeChart).
    draw(data)

As well a drop down lists, there is a number range slider control which can be used to set minimum and maximum values of numerical filter, and a string filter that lets you filter data within a column using a particular term (it doesn’t seem to support Boolean search operators though…) Read more about the controls here: Google visualisation API chart controls

Something else I hadn’t noticed before: sort events applied to tables can also be used to trigger the sorting of data within a chart, which means you can offer interactions akin to some of those found on Many Eyes.

Whilst looking through the Google APIs interactive playground, I also noticed a couple of other in-page data shaping tools that I hadn’t noticed before: group and join

Group, which lets you group rows in a table and present and aggregated view of them:

That is, if you have data loaded into a datatable in a web page, you can locally produce summary reports based on that data using the supported group operation?

There’s also a join operation that allows you to merge data from two datatables where there is a commmon column (or at least, common entries in a given column) between the two tables:

What the join command means is that you can merge data from separate queries onto one or more Google spreadsheets within the page.

With all these programming components in place, it means that Google visulisation API support is now comprehensive to do all sorts of interactive visualisations within the page (I’m not sure of any other libraries that offer quite so many tools for wrangling data in the page? (The YUI datatable supports sorting and filtering, but I think that’s about it for data manipulation?)

I guess it also means that you can start to treat a web page as a database containing one or more datatables within it, along with tool support/function calls that allow you to work that database and display the results in a variety of visual ways?! And more than that, you can use interactive graphical components to construct dynamic queries onto the data in a visual way?!

PS here are a couple of other ways of using a Google spreadsheet as a database:
– Using Google Spreadsheets as a Database with the Google Visualisation API Query Language
– Using Google Spreadsheets Like a Database – The QUERY Formula