DXP Frontend

Purpose

The public face of NESO. Where end users discover and search datasets, preview resources, and start downloads.

• Render the catalogue: home, search, dataset, resource preview pages.
• Drive a great search experience (filters, facets, sorting).
• Render previews (CSV table, GeoJSON map, JSON viewer).
• Surface persistent dataset URLs for citation.
• Handle public + authenticated end-user flows (sign in, profile, API tokens).

Tech stack

CKAN APIs consumed

The Feeds-driven scheduled job and the in-browser data explorer call the following CKAN endpoints:

• current_package_list_with_resources
• datapackage_show
• datastore_search
• datastore_search_sql
• organization_list
• resource_show
• resource_view_list
• show_popular_datasets
• tag_list

Data flow & caching

• Metadata sync. A scheduled job runs every 5 minutes, pulling metadata from CKAN via the Feeds module and persisting it as Drupal entities.
• Entity cache. Drupal entities are cached in the database and Memcache, so page renders do not hit CKAN.
• HTML cache. Rendered pages are cached in Varnish, then Cloudflare in front of that.
• Live data preview. When a user opens a data file page, the Data Explorer library calls CKAN datastore_search directly from the browser — this path is not cached by Drupal/Varnish.
• Invalidation. Each 5-minute sync updates the Drupal entities, which triggers cache invalidation downstream. Effective freshness for catalogue metadata is therefore ~5 minutes; data previews are live.

Repo location

Managed by the NESO DXP team; Code lives within their repo.

See also

• User Guide
• Decoupled Data API
• Development · DXP development

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Last reviewed: 2026-05-04