Question

I want to build a stock website with Django, and I found a Javascript library (tickp) to make charts, but I don’t know Javascript, nor do I know how to read json data in a Django template. I use this code to retrieve the stock data from Yahoo Finance.

I put these .py and .js in my folder, and my views like this:

from stock.stockretriever import StockRetriever

def stockretriever(request,number):
    data = StockRetriever().get_historical_info('YHOO')
    return HttpResponse(simplejson.dumps(data),mimetype='application/json')

But I don’t know how I should write the template, can somebody tell me?

thanks.

Answer 1

You have two options:

1. render a template with data included
2. dynamically fetch data from the server

If you go for 1. you could add something like this to your template:

<script type="text/javascript">
   var my_data = {{ json_plot_data }};
</script>

The template includes also the javascript code that generates the plots from the data. The view function would include the data fetching and return a context object like so:

def my_stock_plot_view(request, number):
    # get stock data
    json_data = simplejson.dumps(data)
    django.shortcuts.render(request, 'template.html', {'json_plot_data':json_data})

If you go for 2. you would need to use something like jQuery.ajax to dynamically load json data using an ajax request. That request would invoke your view, in the jQuery.ajax call you specify that the request returns JSON which automatically makes the data available as an object to Javascript. In the jQuery.ajax success handler you would pass the data to your plot function.