Level Up Your n8n Reports: A Guide to Building Dynamic D3.js Dashboards with your AI automations

I've been pushing the boundaries of what's possible with automated reporting in n8n and wanted to share a recent breakthrough.

We all know that generating basic HTML reports is straightforward, but creating truly dynamic, professional-grade visualizations can be a challenge.

My goal was to create a fully interactive D3.js dashboard, embed it in a report, and have it render perfectly in both a browser and a generated PDF.

The catch? I wanted to do it without coding the D3.js visualization manually.

In case you are not familiar with D3.js, it is a free, open-source JavaScript library that enables developers to create dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers using web standards like HTML, SVG, and CSS.

D3 stands for "Data-Driven Documents" and allows data to be bound to DOM elements, making it possible to manipulate documents based on the underlying data.

Unlike template-based chart libraries, D3 provides low-level helper functions to select elements, bind data, and generate custom visualizations with maximum flexibility.

D3 empowers developers to build a wide variety of visualizations, including charts, graphs, maps, and more, with responsive interactivity and animation support.

After some of trial and error, I've perfected a workflow that uses a n8n workflow as a "D3.js coder on demand."

The final result running inside a report is shown on the video.

I'm considering making a detailed video tutorial on the entire workflow, which would cover:

Data Shaping: Using a Code node to transform a messy API response into a clean JSON array perfect for D3. (I'll share the AI prompt used to generate this transformation script).

The "Component Prompt": The exact prompt I used to get an LLM to write the complete, minified, and self-contained HTML/CSS/D3.js component with responsive viewBox SVGs.

Dynamic Injection: The final "Set" node expression for combining a master CSS template, the main report body, and the dynamically generated dashboard component.