Facility Control

Hi everyone,

I am currently designing a custom DashBoard panel for an upcoming live Election Night broadcast. I am looking for the best architectural approach to implement a specific database-to-UI workflow.

Our backend is a local Python API connected to a SQL Server database, and it is already fully functional and tested successfully via HTML/browser clients.

Here is the exact workflow we want to build in DashBoard:

1. Database Trigger: The operator clicks a "Load Database" button. This wakes up the data-flow and fetches the initial list of cities from our local API (GET /api/villes).

2. Real-time Filtered List: This populates a dropdown/combo list. We need a search field at the top of this list that dynamically filters the entries in real-time, as the operator types each letter.

3. Content Display Window: Clicking a city from the list must immediately fetch that specific city's data from our second endpoint (GET /api/resultats/<city_name>) and display its content (candidates, scores, votes) inside a dedicated window/container on the dashboard.

4. Future Routing (FYI): In the next phase of the project, we will use this data to send commands to our graphics engines (Ross XPression, Viz Trio, and Viz Arc). DashBoard will automatically select the correct graphic template to trigger on each machine depending on the data payload.

Right now, we are focusing purely on steps 1, 2, and 3: connecting the database and bringing the data into the UI cleanly.

My questions for the community:

• Given that we have thousands of cities, what is the recommended native pattern in DashBoard to achieve this letter-by-letter filtering combo box smoothly without freezing the UI? Should the button load all constraints at once, or is there a way to filter progressively?

• What is the cleanest UI architecture to link the combo box selection to a dedicated absolute container (<abs>) acting as the information display window?

If anyone has built a similar database lookup interface for elections or sports, I would love to hear your advice or see some sample OGLML/OgScript structures.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best regards,

Gaëtan

I have some experience with 2 and 3. I haven't seen anyone fetch data from an API and I suspect you need a couple python services or scripts to generate a data file that Dashboard is more familiar with before importing your data, like JSON or CSV for both the first and second end points. You could trigger them with an asyncPost.

As for 2. Realtime Filtered List, I've been importing my data into struct arrays and then deriving a choice constraint out of columns of the struct array. This allows you to use the Dropdown List (7) widget as a search tool for any data in that column (the list of cities in your case). In our case, we're using this to search through bill numbers. The order of the choice constraint list corresponds to the needed row in the struct array, so once the user has found the item they need, a selector parameter ties that back to the struct row. (If there's a better way to do this, I'd love to know.)

The struct to choice constraint piece is done with a task assigned to the file picker (which would be your 'load database' button). The task creates the struct from the csv data, creates an array with just one column of the struct array, and then populates choice constraint with that array.

The choice constraint tells the selector parameter which struct row data to use and that row is then assigned to individual parameters that will be displayed however you want them to be in your abs (based on the widgets you assigned to them). A task assigned to the Dropdown list assigns the selector parameter and pulls the correct data from the struct row and assigns it to the parameters that will be used in your display.

Once you've figured out data handling, 4. Future Routing is pretty easy.

Combo boxes in DashBoard already filter the options as the user types so as long as you set the constraint to the list of available options (see other exaples on the forum) this should be relatively simple and automatic.  My recommendation would be to use a string parameter with the 'combo' widget and set the 'strict' property of the constraint to true to avoid allowing the user to type entries that are not part of your list.