React Dashboard

Creating a React dashboard involves creating a web application that provides users with a graphical representation of data, generally in tables, graphs, charts, and other widgets. React, an extensively used JavaScript toolkit for developing user interfaces is appropriate for constructing interactive and customizable dashboards.

1. Launching the React Project:

To get started, create a new React project. You can speed up the process by using the create-react-app tool:

npx create-react-app my-dashboard-app

cd my-dashboard-app

Replace my-dashboard-app with the name of your desired project. The create-react-app command will generate a new React application with requirements and a directory layout.

2. Designing Dashboard Components:

A React dashboard often comprises numerous components representing various user interface aspects. The following are examples of standard components:

Header: Shows the title and navigation components.

Sidebar: Provides links for navigation or options for switching between different dashboard displays or pages.

Main material Area: The data visualization components and additional material will be presented here.

Widgets for Data Visualisation: Elements that show charts, graphs, tables, etc.

Make these components and place them in the src/components folder. Files such as Header.js, Sidebar.js, MainContent.js, and DataWidget.js are examples.

3. Dashboard design:

You may customize your dashboard components with CSS or CSS-in-JS library-like styled-components. Styles should be defined in separate CSS files or combined with the components.

4. Data Obtaining and Management:

Data must be retrieved and managed via APIs, databases, or physical sources to be shown on the dashboard. You can create API queries with tools like Axis and handle data with React's state or state management frameworks like Redux.

5. Visualisation of Data:

A dashboard's most important feature is data visualization. React supports several prominent data visualization libraries, which aid in the presentation of data in charts, graphs, and various other formats. The following are some prominent data visualization libraries for React:

chart.js: A simple and adaptable charting framework that supports various chart formats, like graphs with lines, pie charts, bar charts, etc.

React-Vis: It is a set of reusable React components for creating interactive data visualizations.

Recharts: A charting library for React that is based on D3 and streamlines the process of making charts.

6. Use of React-Vis for Data Visualisation:

Let's utilise the react-vis package to construct a basic line chart in our dashboards to show some example data.

npm install react-vis

Create a new file called LineChart.js in the src/components folder:

import React from 'react';

import { XYPlot, LineSeries, XAxis, YAxis, VerticalGridLines, HorizontalGridLines } from ‘react-vis';

const LineChart = () => {

  const data = [

    { x: 0, y: 8 },

    { x: 1, y: 5 },

    { x: 2, y: 4 },

    { x: 3, y: 9 },

    { x: 4, y: 1 },

  ];

  return (

    <div>

      <h3>An Example of Line Chart </h3>

      <XYPlot width={200} height={250}>

        <VerticalGridLines />

        <HorizontalGridLines />

        <XAxis />

        <YAxis />

        <LineSeries data={data} />

      </XYPlot>

    </div>

  );

};

export default LineChart;

Now, in your MainContent.js, import and use that LineChart component:

import React from 'react';

import LineChart from './LineChart';

const MainContent = () => {

  return (

    <div>

      <h2>The main section Content</h2>

      <LineChart />

      {/*You can add other visualizations*/}

    </div>

  );

};

export default MainContent;

7. Assembling the Dashboard

In the App.js file, connect all of the components to build the dashboard layout:

import React from 'react';

import Header from './components/Header';

import Sidebar from './components/Sidebar';

import MainContent from './components/MainContent';

const App = () => {

  return (

    <div>

      <Header />

      <div style={{ display: 'flex' }}>

        <Sidebar />

        <MainContent />

      </div>

    </div>

  );

};

export default App;

8. Starting the Dashboard:

Finally, to see the dashboard you created in action, launch the development server:

npm start