Let’s Build a Dashboard!

Over the course of this workshop, 0:00 we're going to be learning about channels by adding a real time dashboard 0:01 to a Django project. 0:04 This is the kind of addition that channels makes possible and 0:05 which can allow you to start super charging your Django products. 0:08 Let's take a quick tour of what we'll be doing by looking at our finished project. 0:11 So we've started with an existing Django project, 0:16 we're tracking how members of city council voted on each measure. 0:18 It's a pretty simple app since the focus of the workshop is channels, 0:22 not Django itself. 0:25 Due to this will just add a modifier data through the admin 0:27 set of building any sort of crowd features in the app. 0:30 Let's look at what we have available here. 0:33 Now a project has one app the votes app and the votes app has two models votes and 0:35 voters, or rather vote and voter, because the admin pluralizes this. 0:40 So we go look at the voter page we can look at say Mayor Adamson, and 0:46 we see that we have a name which is the person's last name, 0:50 and we have a title which would be their position on city council. 0:53 And now that we have some voters, we can also look at the votes. 0:56 So let's actually add a new vote. 1:02 So at the top of the vote we list the issue. 1:05 So this would be like a proposal number or pave Lombard Street or whatever. 1:07 And then we have which category it belongs to and 1:13 you can add more of these in the model's .py if you need to, and 1:16 then you can choose who voted yes and who voted no for that particular vote. 1:20 And if we look at our finished dashboard here, we'll see that there is a listing of 1:24 each council member and how they voted on particular categories. 1:28 If we open up the admin interface in another window, 1:31 which we conveniently already have open, and we add a new issue. 1:34 So let's say this is issue number 89 and it is for Housing. 1:37 And Mayor Adamson and Tompkins, and 1:43 Perez, all voted yes, but Bello voted no. 1:47 And then let's save this one. 1:51 And we can see that the vote counts updated in real time. 1:54 Now, behind the scenes, our browser in the window where we've loaded the dashboard, 1:58 has opened a web connection to our Django project running with channels. 2:02 When we save a vote, we're firing an event that channels picks up and 2:06 routes a special event handling code to that channels calls a consumer. 2:09 The consumer gets the message and send some data over the website, 2:13 gets the connection back to the browser. 2:16 The JavaScript in the browser then updates the dashboard. 2:18 If any of this seems confusing or like magic now, 2:21 it should get clearer as we dive into the code. 2:24 In the next video will start getting our hands dirty by installing and 2:26 configuring the channels package. 2:29