Recently we discussed how to use Plotly and built a scatter plot to display the ratio between the number of reviews and the average rating for Russian Breweries registered on Untappd. Each marker on the plot has two properties, the registration period and the beer range. And today we are going to introduce you to Dash, a Python framework for building analytical web applications. First, create a new file name app.py with a get_scatter_plot(n_days, top_n) function from the previous article.

import dash
import dash_core_components as dcc
import dash_html_components as html
from get_plots import get_scatter_plot

After importing the necessary libraries we need to load CSS styles and initiate our web app:

external_stylesheets = ['https://codepen.io/chriddyp/pen/bWLwgP.css']
app = dash.Dash(__name__, external_stylesheets=external_stylesheets)

Create a dashboard structure:

app.layout = html.Div(children=[
       html.Div([
           dcc.Graph(id='fig1'),
       ]) ,
       html.Div([
           html.H6('Time period (days)'),
           dcc.Slider(
               id='slider-day1',
               min=0,
               max=100,
               step=1,
               value=30,
               marks={i: str(i) for i in range(0, 100, 10)}
           ),
           html.H6('Number of breweries from the top'),
           dcc.Slider(
               id='slider-top1',
               min=0,
               max=500,
               step=50,
               value=500,
               marks={i: str(i) for i in range(0, 500, 50)})
       ])
])

Now we have a plot and two sliders, each with its id and parameters: minimum value, maximum value, step, and initial value. Since the sliders data will be displayed in the plot we need to create a callback. Output is the first argument that displays our plot, the following Input parameters accept values on which the plot depends.

@app.callback(
   dash.dependencies.Output('fig1', 'figure'),
   [dash.dependencies.Input('slider-day1', 'value'),
    dash.dependencies.Input('slider-top1', 'value')])
def output_fig(n_days, top_n):
    get_scatter_plot(n_days, top_n)

At the end of our script we will add the following line to run our code :

if __name__ == '__main__':
   app.run_server(debug=True)

Now, whenever the script is running our local IP address will be displayed in the terminal. Let’s open it in a web browser to view our interactive dashboard, it’s updated automatically when moving the sliders.