使用格式构建报告

Question

I am utilizing a background server connected to a GUI Flask application (both coded in python) to serve up report based information. My report will have rows of information with columns of years.

I would like to keep the GUI as independent of the background reports as possible, to keep the report development burden on the server.

The problem I am faced with is how to incorporate the format of the information in the report rows so that the GUI can represent the information appropriately. I share a report example below:

          2020     2019     2018
Sales   $1,000   $1,300   $1,052
Growth    -23%      24%       --

Passing the data to the GUI would be managed with a dataframe / pysql process. Flask will of course be utilizing an html format. If the format was confined to the columns, I could use dataframe formatting to codify, but the variant display formats are occurring in the rows.

I will be grateful for any thoughts on how I might approach this. Thanks.

Answer 1

Assuming that you don't want to return data as one string with the whitespacing (line breaks etc) used above, one of the most common approaches to returning data from a server to be consumed by a client/GUI is to use XML or JSON. JSON's probably sufficient, and Python has a built-in module for converting dictionaries and lists to JSON . If you're working with Pandas, it also has built-in JSON decoders .