Preview of tabular data /documents

[Jo-Schie]

We are considering using Geonode as an open-data catalogue for our organization that should inform data analysts and users about existing open datasets that could be beneficial to their work. The request from our institution is that we should be able to store spatial as well as non-spatial data inside of this catalogue and also just create references to other existing data portals. Looking through geonode documentation and trying the demo, I saw that geonode supports most of the requests:

GeoNode allows to publish tabular and text data and to manage metadata and associated documents. Documents can be uploaded directly from your disk. The following documents types are allowed: .doc, .docx, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .ods, .odt, .odp, .pdf, .png, .ppt, .pptx, .rar, .sld, .tif, .tiff, .txt, .xls, .xlsx, .xml, .zip, .gz, .qml.

Through the document detailed page is possible to view, download and manage a document.

My question would be if it was possible to also pre-view a table (e.g. in xls format) or if this is not implemented yet, if such an implementation would be possible? How difficult would it be to add this functionality if it does not exist yet?

[t-book]

Hi @Jo-Schie you are right. Previewing of tabular data of documents directly in the browser is not implemented. Two possible implementations. More work: create a custom version of the documents app that parses the doc and stores it in a db table. Then, when someone requests, the doc do what every you want with it. (That is how actually ckan does it). OR less work. Just override the document's template. In case of tabular data, you could provide a new button that passes the data to some frontend solution like: https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs
Both are untested.

[Jo-Schie]

wow that was a fast response. Happy to hear that it is technically possible and probably within a managable amount of time. Fantastic, thanks. I will discuss this with my colleagues. If we opt for Geonode would this be a feature that is interesting for main here as well?

[gannebamm]

See also #8714 ;)

[giohappy]

The GNIP linked by @gannebamm in the mid/long term goal but as @t-book says a quick solution would be to either implement a viewer for tabular data in MapStore or hijack somehow the document viewer and show a custom page (I'm not sure if it's doable right now though).

Of course I would be in favor to have a builtin tabular viewer inside the MapStore client, something similar to what @allyoucanmap has done to experiment with 3D gltf and pcd data