SalishSeaCast Web Page View Figure Metadata

This section discusses:

  • how to add figure metadata to the salishsea_site.views.salishseacast module to make a figure appear on a web page

  • how to run a local instance of the salishsea website to confirm that the figure is on the web page

We’ll use the nowcast.figures.research.tracer_thalweg_and_surface figure module as an example.

You should run your local salishsea website server for testing in a Nowcast Figures Development Environment. You can activate it with:

$ source activate nowcast-fig-dev

salishsea_site.views.salishseacast Figure Metadata

The salishsea.eos.ubc.ca site web app gathers figures that have been rendered by the nowcast system make_plots worker and presents them on web pages that are linked by date from the https://salishsea.eos.ubc.ca/nemo/results/ page.

Each row on the https://salishsea.eos.ubc.ca/nemo/results/ page contains links to pages that are generated from a page template by a view function in the salishsea_site.views.salishseacast module. Each view function uses a list of salishsea_site.views.salishseacast.FigureMetadata objects that is also defined in the salishsea_site.views.salishseacast module. The FigureMetadata objects set the title for the figure that will appear on the web page, and the svg_name of the figure files rendered by the make_plots worker.

So, to add a figure rendered from our nowcast.figures.research.tracer_thalweg_and_surface figure module to the Biology page, we add a FigureMetadata object to the biology_figures list in the salishsea_site.views.salishseacast module:

FigureMetadata(
    title='Nitrate Fields Along Thalweg and on Surface',
    svg_name='nitrate_thalweg_and_surface',
)

The value of the title attribute appears in Plots list on the page as a link to the figure lower down on the page, and it appears as a heading above the figure image.

The value of the svg_name attribute is key that we used to register our figure function module in the make_plots worker. Recall that the key is also used as the root part of the file name into which the figure is rendered. That is:

  • We registered a call to the nowcast.figures.research.tracer_thalweg_and_surface.make_figure() function in the nowcast.workers.make_plots._prep_nowcast_green_research_fig_functions() function using the key nitrate_thalweg_and_surface to produce a nitrate thalweg and surface figure

  • When the make_plots was run with the command-line options nowcast-green research --run-date 2017-04-29 it stored the rendered figure with the file name nitrate_thalweg_and_surface_29apr17.svg

The order of FigureMetadata objects in the biology_figures list determines the order in which the figures appear on the web page.

Testing the Website View

  1. If you haven’t done so already, activate your Nowcast Figures Development Environment:

    $ source activate nowcast-fig-dev\

  2. Assuming that you have successfully run the make_plots worker in test mode for your figure, navigate to your SalishSeaNowcast/ directory, set up the 2 environment variables that the nowcast system expects to find, create a temporary logging directory for it to use:

    (nowcast-fig-dev)$ export NOWCAST_LOGS=/tmp/$USER
(nowcast-fig-dev)$ export NOWCAST_ENV=$CONDA_PREFIX
(nowcast-fig-dev)$ mkdir -p $NOWCAST_LOGS

    and run the make_plots worker to render the figures of the type that you are working on for a recent date (like yesterday). For our test of the nowcast.figures.research.tracer_thalweg_and_surface figure module, the command would be like:

    (nowcast-fig-dev)$ python -m nowcast.workers.make_plots config/nowcast.yaml nowcast-green research --debug --run-date 2017-05-07

  3. Navigate to your salishsea-site/ directory, and launch the local website server with:

    (nowcast-fig-dev)$ cd salishsea-site/
(nowcast-fig-dev)$ pserve --reload development.ini

    You should see output like:

    Starting monitor for PID 10564.
Starting server in PID 10564.
serving on http://0.0.0.0:6543

    but the PID number will be different. The web server is now running in this terminal session. You can stop it with Control-c when you are finished.

  4. Use your browser to navigate to http://localhost:6543/nemo/results/. From there you should be able to navigate to the page that will show you the figures for the date that you ran the make_plots worker for; for our test of the nowcast.figures.research.tracer_thalweg_and_surface figure module, that would be the Biology page.

  5. If you need to edit the FigureMetadata for your figure, the web server will restart automatically when you save the file so that you can see your changes by refreshing the page in your browser.

Automatic Code Formatting

The salishsea_site package uses the`black`_ code formatting tool to maintain a coding style that is very close to PEP 8.

black is installed as part of the Nowcast Figures Development Environment setup.

Before each commit of the salishsea_site.views.salishseacast module please run black to automatically format the code with the command:

$ black salishsea_site/views/salishseacast.py