shiny

The Challenge The Fair Work Convention, set up by the Scottish government, acts as an advisory body to Scottish Ministers. The requirement was the creation of an R-Shiny application for public consumption which allows policymakers, ministers and members of the public to explore the current status of key indicators within the Fair Work Measurement Framework. The resultant application would then be handed back to the Scottish Government. The Project Jumping Rivers developed an R Shiny dashboard solution for the exploration of data.

The Challenge The environment sector generates vast amounts of data and wishes to share this data to drive local action. At a Water Hub Hackathon the Environment Agency (EA) presented their current platform, which includes critical measurements used in determining overall quality of water bodies, and is thus used for identifying potential projects and impact. Our winning submission included the ability to subscribe to data updates, improved visualisation, ability to look at multiple regions at once, improved user experience and modularity.

The Challenge Prior to engagement with Jumping Rivers, Fujifilm used an Excel-based tool for experimental risk assessments. This tool collated all data surrounding the process, including experimental parameters, comments, recommendations, and scoring data for a number of metrics. The tool was difficult to update and prone to breaking due to the rigid structure imposed by Excel. Further, versioning the reports and keeping track of the data was impossible without some central management of the process for updating the document.

The Challenge The client’s in-house data science team had developed a Shiny application using the RStudio desktop IDE. The client wished to develop this Shiny application into a product/service that may be provided to their own clients. The application required a thorough code review for performance and security with certain aspects needing further development (both in-house, and with Jumping Rivers’ support). This included integration with a new, secure data management service and integration with an existing user authentication service.

Using {shinydashboard} is great for creating dashboard prototypes with a header-sidebar-body layout. You can quickly mock up a professional looking dashboard containing a variety of outputs, including plots and tables. However, after a while, you’ll probably have had enough of the “50 shades of blue” default theme. Or, you might have been asked to to follow company branding guidelines, so you need to replace the default colours with custom ones.

Last night, I filled a washing machine with laundry and scheduled it to finish in the morning. And do you know what I had to do next? Nothing. I simply went to bed. In stark contrast to 100 years ago, I didn’t need to fill a bucket with water, I didn’t spend an hour rubbing clothes against a washboard to agitate away the dirt, and I didn’t need to worry about whether the prolonged contact between a cleaning detergent and my hands was damaging to the skin.

What do we mean by “responsiveness”? Confusingly (and rather unhelpfully) when it comes to web applications there are two different topics that may be referred to by the terms “responsive” or “responsiveness”. If you stick “responsive UI” into your favourite search engine the top results will concern “responsive design” - the practice of making websites and applications work across devices, regardless of device and browser dimensions. That’s an interesting and important topic when it comes to designing data-science applications but it’s not what we’re covering here.

This is the final part of a series of three blog posts about using the {shinytest2} package to develop automated tests for shiny applications. In the posts we cover the purpose of browser-driven end-to-end tests for a shiny developer, and tools (like {shinytest2}) that help implement them; how to write and run a simple test using {shinytest2}; how best to design your test code so that it supports your future work (this post).

This is the second of a series of three blog posts about using the {shinytest2} package to develop automated tests for shiny applications. In the posts we will cover the purpose of browser-driven end-to-end tests for a shiny developer, and tools (like {shinytest2}) that help implement them; how to write and run a simple test using {shinytest2} (this post) ; how best to design your test code so that it supports your future work.

This is the first of a series of three blog posts about using the {shinytest2} package to develop automated tests for shiny applications. In the posts we will cover the purpose of browser-driven end-to-end tests for a shiny developer, and tools (like {shinytest2}) that help implement them (this post); how to write and run a simple test using {shinytest2}; how best to design your test code so that it supports your future work.