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Displaying arbitrary nested filesystem directories/file contents on site using Django

I have a directory structure on the filesystem on my server. It can contain an arbitrary level of nested subdirectories, themselves which eventually end up containing “reports”/“queries” which are basically just xml files containing data. I'd like to display this directory structure as a nested collapsible menu list view on my site with the "reports" being the leaves in the menu list view and displaying the data from those "reports" in another area of the page once clicked on. In each of the menu headings I’d like to display the directory name (actually, I have already configured a file that maps the directory names to a more user friendly display name).

The structure of the data on disk looks like this (where the categories and subcategories are directories on the filesystem and the queries represent the files whose information I want to display):

enter image description here

My overall question is:

What’s the best way to read the filesystem directory structure into a python data structure so that I can eventually display it on a website using collapsible nested menus to represent the directory structure.

Since the data is being collected from the filesystem to be displayed on a page request, I’m not sure how to use django templates (if I even should) to generate these collapsible menus since the html being generated for the list structure is read on a page request and can and often does change on the filesystem. I'm not sure how to get a static Django template to work with something like that.

What is the best front-end framework out there that integrates well with Django, and preferably supports nested menus or blinds to an arbitrary depth that would allow me to display these menus and eventually the output of the reports files?

Maybe I should I use a django template to display the initial top level of the directory structure and use ajax to grab the next (and next after that) sub-level of data when a user tries to drill down into a category/directory? Ideally, I’d like to avoid the latency of making a request and waiting for a response every time a list item is clicked so I’d like to build the entire page on the server before sending it to the client. But again, I’m not sure if it’s even possible to use django templates to display arbitrary data like this.

Any suggestions and advice are much appreciated, thanks.

PS: I think I can just construct the html programmatically to display the directory structure and send that to the client but I'd like to avoid doing it that way if possible.

Solution

  • Just a suggestion but I would consider keeping a database table of all of the entries with their disk path, file size, file name, etc. Fill that with a scheduled job. Then search in the dbms against those paths/names.

    That allows you to show a little bit more information to a user, and makes everything on the django/front end side use tooling that you'd normally expect to work with.

    Take the file system out of the equation and think about what the user really wants to be able to do, odds are they don't care about how it is stored on the server.