README.md

In chris-mcnally95/EducationDashboard: Education Dashbaord

Christopher McNally

EducationDashboardGolem

The goal of EducationDashboardGolem is to overview and monitor COVID-19 cases within school-aged children in Northern Ireland.

It was developed by the Data Analyst Team at the Public Health Agency using R within the {golem} package.

Instructions for Development Team

This application has been modularised to fit into the {golem} framework. Golem does a good job of explaining things within the package environment but I will include some instructions to help you navigate this particular environment.

The modules themselves can be found in the /R folder, along with other key function scripts.

When running a local version of this repo, to utilise the {golem} framework, you will have to alter the working directory of the application to that of your own. This can be done by going to /inst and then golem-config.yml and changing the working directory to your own path. Be sure to then place this file name within your .gitignore so it does not get updated within the master branch.

In order for the dynamic loading of the data from the Synapse server, the data_prep.R file resides in the base directory of the app and is sourced within the app_server.R file upon app initilisation.

The environment can be confusing if you are unfamiliar with the R package development process but the most important files are as follows:

• app.R - This file is where you deploy the application on the PHA R Studio Connect server

• The /R folder - This is where all the scripts that run the app are stored. These should be modularised and called from the app_server.R and app_ui.R files (See the 02_dev.R file in /dev for information on making new modules)

• run_dev.R - This file is located within the /dev folder inside the main directory. Running this script will allow you to launch the application locally

• The /tests folder - This folder is where the unit tests for the application are stored. The tests still require some tuning but there are some standard scripts that test the over all operation of the application. See next point for running tests.

• 03_deploy.R - The file is located in the /dev folder and contains a function called devtools::check(). Running this will execute all the unit test scripts within the /tests folder and display the results.

Unit Testing

I have researched and implemented various testing techniques within this application.

A package called “shinytest” records an operational session of the application and compares your test version to that session snapshot. An issue with snapshot comparison testing with this application is that the data is dynamic and as such will flag up new updated data changes when comparing to an old snapshot. Therefore, if utilising this package, check the results and determine if the only error are the infoboxes on the Home page.

I have also utilised “testthat”. My scripts for this package are located within /tests/module_tests.R. The theory here is that it will test a mini server session of the called module and test what is the expected output. For example, an expected output type for a DT:datatable and ggplot2:ggplot is of the type “list”, therefore if anything fails and a datatable or a plot is not generated, the test fails. Warning, for some reason these tests can only be ran upon the running of devtools::check(), so build your tests and then run this.

Several pre-constructed test scripts also reside in the /tests folder.

Resources

The resources used to build this application came from the Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps book by Colin Fay.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the EducationDashboardGolem project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

chris-mcnally95/EducationDashboard documentation built on April 14, 2022, 2:02 p.m.