Generating SVG Output (from Graphviz) in your Django App

So accomplishing new coding tasks can be a challenge with interruptions and I've had a lot of interruptions this week but I finally got there. And I'm thankful!

I have an app that is storing data, meaning Django models for the uninitiated. What is in there doesn't matter, but it is something that is conducive to plotting with graphviz. So the starting point is a string that is in the .dot format. I have some code that makes queries to the database and I end up with a string.

So there is a utility function that creates this string...

def make_svg_str:
 #blah blah blah snip
 dot_string += "}"
 p = subprocess.Popen('/usr/bin/dot -Tsvg', shell=True,\
 stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
 (stdout,stderr) = p.communicate(dot_string)
 return stdout

So I almost got this right the first time except that I forgot the stdout in Popen() which caused the output to go to stdout (and not be assigned to the string) so I saw the .xml in the dev web server logs.

The graphviz string (dot_string) is being piped to the dot executable and then the function is returning the XML SVG as a string, and is obviously assigned to the stdout variable in the tuple.

Now the tricky part within my views.py.

My first mistake was using the Django CSV docs instead of the PDF docs because the latter is what we need. I also didn't remember that HttpResponse is a file-like object so we can can just write to it once we have the SVG text.

def svg(request):
f = Foo.objects.all()
response = HttpResponse(mimetype='image/svg+xml')
response['Content-Disposition'] = 'filename=somefilename.svg'
response.write(make_svg_str(f))
return response

So this will display your image within your browser (which is what I wanted) instead of downloading file if you the use the "attachment" in the Content-Disposition key.

The name of the game is taking shortcuts that get the job done. I'm using the admin interface to provide a good-enough UI to enter the data and now I'm using Graphviz to visualize that data without having to spend a lot of time writing UIs or nasty JavaScript.