Fingertips Data Downloader

Fingertips Data Downloader is a Python application that simplifies the process of downloading public health data from the Fingertips API. The application first fetches metadata related to area types and indicators then presents a user-friendly tkinter GUI for selecting and downloading relevant datasets.

Core functionality

• The application downloads metadata via the fingertips_py package, joining data related to area types and indicators; building a map of which indicators are available for each area type.
• The tkinter GUI allows users to navigate available datasets by area type and select specific indicators to download.

By default, one .csv file is downloaded per selected indicator, containing data for all profiles in that area for all available time periods.

Additional features:

There are three checkboxes in the bottom-left corner of the GUI that toggle additional functions:

• Combine Data Before Saving: Instead of creating individual files for each indicator, combines all of the data frames after the selected indicators have been downloaded, resulting in one concatenated .csv file.

• Keep Latest Data Only: Applies a filter to the data frame for each indicator to select the most recent period.

• Delete Empty Columns: Before saving indiviudal or combined dataframes as csv, checks if columns contain all Nulls or NaN values and deletes those columns before saving.

Setup:

Clone this repository.

Create a new virtual environment

python -m venv venv

Activate the environment

venv/scripts/activate

Ensure the required Python packages are installed:

pip install -r requirements.txt

This installs packages: fingertips_py, pandas, tqdm and tk and their subcomponents.

Usage

Run main.py:

python main.py

Directory Structure

data/processed/ Contains the downloaded data sets ready for analysis.

data/helpers/ Contains json and csv files storing the indicator and area type metadata.

scripts Contains python files that main.py depends on. You do not need to run these.

Directories are created automatically.

Scripts

The repository contains four python scripts:

main.py, initialises the requried metadata from fingertips and launches the tkinter interface, as well as contains the program main loop.

scripts/data_processing contains functions used for downloading and cleaning data sets from fingertips.

scripts/fetch_initial_data downloads the required metadata for area types and indicator id's, joins those tables and creates helper files.

scripts/ui contains functions for the tkinter components including logic for the interactive elements.

License

This repository is dual licensed under the Open Government v3 & MIT. All code and outputs are subject to Crown Copyright.