Business Analytics in Drupal with Views - Drupalcon DC

05 Mar 2009
Posted by jcfiala

Business Analytics in Drupal with Views

phase ii technology - does a lot of contrib work.

Recurring problems are fun - every now and then try to create a generic solution that works 80% of the time - rest of the time charge money for custom development

Work with a lot ofdata, working with data is fun, but you need to visual data in different ways
Use views to visualize some data - unfortunately, it's limited to rendering data in tabular ways, and lots of clients want charts and graphs. Wondered if this was cool for other people, and

People were wondering if this was even possible - cool idea, but what?
busyness analytics is a series thing - done with sap, or microsoft - nobody really thinks about ba with drupal/php. Showed list of famous PHP website as well as list of famous/serious Drupal sites like Onion, FastCompany, NY Observer, recovery.gov. So, Drupal is big business/serious

Not trying to replicate jasper - trying to build on views to create ba graphs/charts.

enough talk - showing

Views + ViewsCharts => Charts ViewsCharts is the module.

New module, contributed this morning 6am

Choose fields to be used in chart - fields as x axis changes

pie charts, 3d bar, bar chart

Can write own chart providers if current ones are not enough.
OpenFlashCharts
AmCharts
Google Charts

Except: It's not all that easy - sql grooping and aggregation
allows you to choose which fields to group on and to sum on
He hopes that this addon module becomes part of views.
views_groupby - it's a utility 'field' that configures the settings for the grouping you need to do.

Fields to group on
SQL Aggregation function
Fields to aggragate with the sql function
field to sort resultset on (after sql is applied)
sorting direction - ascending/descending

real-world examples - showing a pie chart of 'term frequency' top terms to show number of nodes term is on
Feed activity bar chart

Since we built this in views, also get to use Panels, CustomPage, Context and put graphs and charts whereever you like. Graph display of node types or whichever.

So, what's next? what it gets used for is up to us.

Which charting code is used limited now but wants to expand into others.

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