The Northwind Traders Dashboard

What is it?

The Northwind Traders Dashboard is an R/Shiny application built to display the data from the Northwind Traders data base in an easy to consume format. It is built in R, using R (duh), CSS and JavaScript. The application was packaged in a Docker container and deployed to an AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance.

Motivation for the Project

I wanted to hone my skills in creating Shiny applications because finding ways to share data and analyses is just as important as the analyses themselves. In this case, I wanted to create a functional dashboard that looks good, is easy to use, and provides insights about the data it presents. I primarily use R, so R/Shiny was my web application framework of choice.

The data set used for this dashboard comes from the Northwind Traders data base, provided by Microsoft to help acquaint people with SQL queries. The data base contains information on customers, sales employees and the sales they make, company inventory, etc. While the data is generic, it was perfect for this project because it allowed me practice my SQL querying skills on the type of data that one can expect from many companies.

What I Learned

Throughout building this application, I was exposed to many technologies that I have either never used or had minimal experience with.

• For starters, my command of CSS and JavaScript have greatly improved and have expanded what is possible in Shiny applications. There is so much you can do with them to help present data and they greatly improved my echarts4r data visualizations.

• Docker and AWS EC2 were always two technologies that I knew were super useful, but never dabbled with. This project made me realize that both of them are extremely powerful when paired with Shiny apps and are much easier work with than I imagined.

• Testing your code makes a big difference in how you write code. Including unit tests (I used testthat) for my application made me think twice about how I write functions, since I will inevitably have to write tests for those functions. Ensuring that your code is easily testable when you first write it makes life much easier down the line.

• Managing package dependencies from the beginning also makes your life so much easier. I used renv, and by doing so I could automatically include the R dependencies tracked by renv in my Dockerfile. This made my file much simpler and more concise, and I never have to worry about my app breaking due to package conflicts. This makes the application more stable.

• Lastly, I got to experiment with and really get to know some incredible packages and what they can do. Rhino proved to be an incredible package that provided me with a way to organize the structure of my app. rhino is now my favorite way to build Shiny apps because it helps you include your CSS and JS scripts seamlessly, as well as give you an efficient testing structure. The many features of this package provides Shiny developers with incredibly useful tools to build reliable and efficient apps.

There is a lot more I could say, but I’ll hold back for the sake of brevity. If you want to take the app for a test drive, go ahead and click the APPLICATION button at the top of this page. Or if you’re curious about my code, all of it is within the GitHub repository linked at the top as well.

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