Budget Explorer issues

The PDX Budget Explorer is a side project for the moment, used as a way to demonstrate the web services. So rather than adding to the Issues for this Budget project, we are managing issues for the Budget Explorer separately here on this wiki page.

Issues

1. Enhance the R API to join "codes" to budget data, so that the plots can show displayable names, rather than codes, e.g. bureau_name, rather than bureau_code and service_area_name, rather than service_area_code.
2. Make the plots look prettier.
3. Put the base URL in a configuration file that can be overridden easily in a dev environment. It needs to be defined in a file that is not committed to the source repository, e.g. like project_config.py for the Django code. The URL is currently hard-coded in the data.R file: BASE_URL <- "http://service.civicpdx.org/budget"
4. Enhance the R API to return a list of Fiscal Years that are represented in the database. The list is currently hard-coded in the commonConstants.R file, but could be derived from a call to the one of the /history/* endpoints.

Ideas for plots

1. Line plot of total PDX budget by year.
2. Overlay line charts of accounting object totals by year.
3. Stacked area graph of {service area or bureau} totals by year.
4. Bubble chart of {service area or bureau} totals by year (animated? to show change over time). See: "Creating plots in R using ggplot2 - part 6: weighted scatterplots".
5. Given a bureau and year, bar plot of program codes by amount.

Completed work

1. First draft of a line plot of 'Service Areas by Fiscal Year'.
2. Add a progress indicator for the plots that require the /history endpoint, because those queries take a long time. See "Progress indicators" for implementing a progress indicator.
3. Implement "tabsets" or "navlist" in the UI with one tab per plot type, so that it is easy to add new plot types (see "Application layout guide"). The current single page can be the first tab. We need at least 3 more tabs for the plots defined in John Smith's graphs-1.Rmd.
4. Enhance the R API to provide a function that returns all of the Budget History table. That new function is needed to support the plots specified in John Smith's graphs-1.Rmd.