motivations

Introduction

The goal of kitems is to provide a framework to manage data frame items and a set of tools to implement it within R Shiny web applications.

When working on a R Shiny project that performs operations based on tabular data, whether it is for data analysis or data visualization, the first milestone in the project is to enable standard data processing.

Say the purpose of the project is to build a task manager and deliver a dashboard to follow its KPIs.
It will require to write code to implement the baseline of the project:

a data frame to manage the tasks objects
(with columns corresponding to the different attributes of a task: date, description, owner…)
a data table view to display the tasks to the users
inputs to allow data filtering
(maybe focus on the tasks of the current year)
buttons to perform standard operations like create a new task, update or delete existing ones
forms to allow user to create or update a task
functions to manage those operations in the back end
(check inputs before creating a new task, ask for a confirmation before another is deleted)
functions to ensure data persistence, quality and management in general

Now say that another project is to build a dashboard to follow fruit stock.
A data frame of fruit objects is needed, a table view, buttons & functions to perform standard operations…

In many cases, it involves to write code that allows to handle the same set of operations but for different objects, which makes this code hard to reuse in another project.

The purpose of kitems is to wrap those standard operations into a package that is not dependent on the type of item - something that is part of a list or group of things - to manage.

So that developers can focus on the specific capabilities of their project.