1. Introduction

RaMa-Scene is a Django+React web-application that allows for analyzing Environmentally Extended Input-Output (EEIO) tables from EXIOBASE v3.3.

Several on-the-fly calculations are performed to generate EEIO results. The on-the-fly calculations are made possible by loading in EXIOBASE raw data into memory and employing background processing using Celery.

1.1. Implementation overview

The back-end can receive two main types of requests from the front-end. A websocket-based request and an Ajax-based request.

Websockets are used for notifying the user and sending queries to the back-end, while Ajax is used to retrieve final results from the back-end.

Terminology:

  • “Tasks” are used for front-end notifications of a given query and a “task” is a calculation process in Celery.
  • “Jobs” are the database objects used by the back-end to remember which calculation (task) is started by which user.
See figure below for an overview of the back-end processes.
_images/graph_overview.png

1.2. Consumers

The module consumers is a Django Channels implementation that handles websockets. Meaning that the consumers module is one of the core communication methods between front-end and back-end. This module also invokes query management to process the queries.

1.3. Query Management

Any query received from the front-end needs to be processed in order to perform calculations and generate result data in a proper format using the query management module.

1.4. Tasks

This module is the heart of the EEIO calculations. The Tasks module implements the Celery background processing implementation that allows to process multiple calculations at the same time, but also calculations that take a long time.

1.5. Models

Models allows to insert and fetch database objects. It contains mapping coordinates for front-end and back-end communication as well as the calculation status and results per user.

1.6. Views

The views module handles the AJAX POST and JSON result response.

1.7. Analyze

For performing the actual IO calculations the analyze module is used.