A page for collecting links, notes, recordings and errata related to Route Profile dashboards.
This page will serve as a repository for Route Profile Dashboard related content. While the merge with CTG staff is ongoing, we will be dividing the content up by CTG and NN, though of course we are all now part of Nelson\Nygaard!
Recording Link if embed not working
This map & list is up to date as of February 4th, 2022. It will be periodically updated as we make more dashboards!
There are different styles of dashboards we can do. We try to follow a standard look and feel for the different version to reduce costs/time, but everything is custom made and can be modified. If you have an idea or don’t see something that suits your needs, reach out to us, we can put something together.
We do not create applications at this time that have multiple levels of authentication. Authentication (private app that requires user sign-in) is handled by hosting through Shiny Server, which offers this service at one-level for all users.
We currently do not make applications that are meant for public feedback. There are a lot of other services out there already tailored for this.
We do custom styling and can match client/project branding for the most part. Reach out to Esther if you have styling specific requests or questions. On the technical side, try to avoid in-line CSS and add your CSS to our external CSS files. We can share more about this during the training webinars.
All of our dashboards / applications right now are made using Shiny. Shiny is an R package that allows you to build production-grade web applications. Basically you are writing JavaScript, HTML, and CSS using R instead of writing those languages directly.
The cons to doing custom development is that it can be hard for the client to understand and maintain long-term if that is their desire. Many agencies know the ESRI suite but lack R users (or enough of them). We sometimes put together maintenance contracts so that we continue to maintain the work later.
The pros of doing custom development is that we have total control over functionality and look and feel, it’s easier for us to meet client requests because we are not limited by a set of available tools/functionality (like building a dashboard with ArcGIS Online).
Our speed and reliability dashboards (BDAT) as they stand are not possible for us to implement using ArcGIS Online.
Some more technical notes:
we use the tidyverse wherever possible
we have transitioned our Shiny work over to using more of Shiny’s robust reactive functionality and are trying to avoid globally scoped variables – if you’re working on an older project you may see that we did not always do this.
we use Git and GitHub and can provide training