How to display data from MongoDB in HTML table using Python

In this article, you will learn the simple process to display data from MongoDB in an HTML table using the Python programming language.

MongoDB is a NoSQL, open source, document-oriented database management system. This is suitable for modern internet applications. Python provides the pymongo module to easily connect with MongoDB.

Step by Step process to fetch data from MongoDB

Install PyMongo Module

First, we need to install the pymongo module. We can install this using the PIP tool.

(env) c:\python37\Scripts\projects>pip install pymongo

On successful installation, it returns something like this-

Collecting pymongo
  Downloading pymongo-3.10.1-cp37-cp37m-win_amd64.whl (354 kB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 354 kB 284 kB/s
Installing collected packages: pymongo
Successfully installed pymongo-3.10.1

Import module and connect to host and port

Once installed, use the following command in a terminal window to start the mongodb daemon.

$ mongod

To connect to the database, import pymongo into the Python file. After importing, create an instance of MongoClient and establish a connection to the default host, i.e., localhost and port 27017.

import pymongo

client = pymongo.MongoClient("mongodb://localhost:27017/")

Suppose we have a collection name "students" that contains name, age and section. We want to display the student's whole information on a webpage in an HTML table.

(env) c:\python37\Scripts\projects>readcsv.py
{'_id': ObjectId('5e70b0d97cff592555515229'), 'name': 'Priska Somya', 'age': 12, 'section': '6A'}
{'_id': ObjectId('5e81e85b73c41dca6835b168'), 'name': 'Alaya', 'age': '12', 'section': '6A'}
{'_id': ObjectId('5e81e85b73c41dca6835b169'), 'name': 'Carle', 'age': '14', 'section': '7C'}
{'_id': ObjectId('5e81e85b73c41dca6835b16a'), 'name': 'Amma', 'age': '11', 'section': '5B'}

Here, we have accessed the 'students' collection data. MongoDB provides the find() method to return the document or documents based on the specified criteria.

import pymongo

client = pymongo.MongoClient("mongodb://localhost:27017/")
mydb = client["school"]
mycol = mydb["students"]

stud = []

tbl="<tr><td>Name</td><td>Age</td><td>Section</td></tr>"
stud.append(tbl)

for y in mycol.find():
    a = "<tr><td>%s</td>"%y['name']
    stud.append(a)
    b = "<td>%s</td>"%y['age']
    stud.append(b)
    c = "<td>%s</td></tr>"%y['section']
    stud.append(c)

Create HTML Template

Next, we have created an HTML template and stored it in a 'contents' variable. In this template, we have passed the above list variable stud within the HTML table element.

contents = '''<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="content-type">
<title>Python Webbrowser</title>
</head>
<body>
<table>
%s
</table>
</body>
</html>
'''%(stud)

Web Browser Module

The webbrowser module is by default available with the Python package. This module includes a feature that allows you to open a webpage in your browser. In the given code, we have created an HTML file and placed the above generated HTML content in it, rendering it in a web browser.

filename = 'webbrowser.html'

def main(contents, filename):
    output = open(filename,"w")
    output.write(contents)
    output.close()

main(contents, filename)    
webbrowser.open(filename)

Complete Code

At the start of this article, we have divided the complete code into chunks to explain the step-by-step process of displaying display data from MongoDB to HTML Table. Here, we merge that all together to get the complete code.

import pymongo
import webbrowser

client = pymongo.MongoClient("mongodb://localhost:27017/")
mydb = client["school"]
mycol = mydb["students"]

stud = []

tbl = "<tr><td>Name</td><td>Age</td><td>Section</td></tr>"
stud.append(tbl)

for y in mycol.find():
    a = "<tr><td>%s</td>"%y['name']
    stud.append(a)
    b = "<td>%s</td>"%y['age']
    stud.append(b)
    c = "<td>%s</td></tr>"%y['section']
    stud.append(c)

contents = '''<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="content-type">
<title>Python Webbrowser</title>
</head>
<body>
<table>
%s
</table>
</body>
</html>
'''%(stud)

filename = 'webbrowser.html'

def main(contents, filename):
    output = open(filename,"w")
    output.write(contents)
    output.close()

main(contents, filename)    
webbrowser.open(filename)

The above code returns the following output to the browser -

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