Creating a dashboard page using NODE-RED in IBM Bluemix

Question

I am trying to create some charts in NODE-RED by extracting the tweets through twitter node and then generating the visualisation in IBM Big sheets.I could achieve this and able to view the charts/workbook in IBM analytics for hadoop service but I would like to know if the output of the Bigsheets charts can be published as a dashboard page using NODE-RED?I am not sure how to deal with this scenario in IBM Bluemix as i am interested in creating a real time analytics page based on the tweets

Appreciate your response

Answer 1

You can create a template node. Inside of that you can basically specify the HTML, CSS, and Javascript you want to use. It's also a template node you can feed in data. So things like msg.payload you can use. You then can connect the template node to an HTTP output node.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, Node-RED is not really designed to be a dashboard or control panel, and AFAIK there are no plans to move that direction (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/node-red/IJAzy233EWE/dn6c5G5Mdh0J).

However, with some creativity and time, you can create dashboards to display data and control panels to send and receive commands using Node-RED to build endpoints and connections between data sources, see Jeff's answer and search npm for similar projects.

You will need to see if BigSheets can export data, hopefully via a REST endpoint. You specifically seem to be wanting to display the actual charts (as an image) as opposed to the data. I have no idea if this is possible, but it doesn't look like it. You can maybe do something by manually extracting the data [1] every so often, or go all out and build a Big SQL application [2].

[1] http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSPT3X_4.0.0/com.ibm.swg.im.infosphere.biginsights.tut.doc/doc/tut_less_bigsheets_exporting.html

[2] http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSPT3X_4.0.0/com.ibm.swg.im.infosphere.biginsights.tut.doc/doc/tut_intro_bigsql.html