Chart.io Dashboard Retriever

Motivation

As much as Chart.io rocks, there is always room for improvement. At Ginger.io, we wanted to distribute a weekly sales report with one page per account. In Chart.io, I had set up a dashboard with a global filter for selecting an account. The report could have been created manually: select an account, wait for dashboard to refresh, save the PDF, and rinse and repeat for each account. Instead, I decided to automate the process using Python, WebDriver, and PhantomJS.

Example

Once you've added the chartio.py file to your project, here's an example of how easy it is to use:

from .chartio import ChartioDashboardRetriever

chartio = ChartioDashboardRetriever(CHARTIO_USERNAME, CHARTIO_PASSWORD)
pdf = chartio.get_pdf_for_dashboard(CHARTIO_DASHBOARD_URL, ["Account 1", "Account 2"])

You can then save the PDF as a file or attach it to an email.

Requirements

You'll need to have the following installed on your machine for this to work:

• Unix packages libicu48, libjpeg-dev, and fontconfig
• Python packages Pillow, PyPDF2, and selenium
• PhantomJS binary

Here's the code I used to install these on a 32-bit Ubuntu machine:

sudo apt-get install libicu48 libjpeg-dev fontconfig
curl -s https://phantomjs.googlecode.com/files/phantomjs-1.9.2-linux-i686.tar.bz2 | sudo tar xfj - --strip-components 2 -C /usr/bin phantomjs-1.9.2-linux-i686/bin/phantomjs
pip install Pillow==2.3.0 PyPDF2==1.19 selenium==2.31.0

Note that the long curl command simply places a copy of the phantomjs binary into /usr/bin. If you end up putting it elsewhere, be sure to update the PHANTOMJS_PATH attribute in chartio.py.