Someone asked me in a PM:
Things seem to have gone very quiet in the forum about flexdash development, and wondered if you could kindly share your longer term vision about it's future.
I'm asking because I'm currently running 3 different dashboard packages, and trying to decide which is going to be my best option for functionality & LTS, so that I can ditch 2 dashboards, and spend more time & effort creating just one.
I read with interest Rob Marcer's recent dashboard review in the flowforge blog, and pleased to see that flexdash featured so positively, so thanks for all the work that you have put in so far.
I thought I might as well answer publicly.
The tl;dr; answer is that I'm busy trying to wrap up a release of another project, which actually uses FlexDash in two different ways, and that work on FlexDash has been on pause because of that.
I'm hoping to get back to FD in the coming weeks but it's likely to be a bit slower going than at the end of last year. The project I'm currently working on includes a dashboard which shows information on a per-viewer basis, i.e., a viewer can select which 'thingie' to view and I'm using the _fd_socket functionality to show each viewer different data. The next step will require me to add a login and per-user permissions to perform certain actions through the dashboard. So far all this is working well, but it has brought some tricky stuff to the surface: building the flows that route per-viewer data is not simple and there are some patterns I'm finding helpful that would be good to support in special nodes or the FD nodes directly. It is providing interesting food for thought.
I'm also implementing some more complex controls, such as watering controls (multiple start times, durations, intervals, water-now, etc). I've been using panels and sticking widgets into panels and while that works it does result in pretty complex flows and getting things to look nice is always a struggle. I need to shift to writing custom widgets instead and while that's obviously possible I'm not happy with the reusability of components, or lack thereof. I need to think whether I can patch something quickly instead of waiting for a bigger remake of some innards.
As you mention, there have not been a lot of posts about FD. I reached the conclusion that I'm building this for myself and for anyone who is willing to pitch in either with code or with use-cases, ideas, testing, etc. I'm not going to do multiple marketing posts per week, that's just not me.
So far what I'm happy about is that I don't see anything that would require me to break existing flows. I keep thinking I may want to reduce the use of Vuetify, use more CSS, replace the dynamic loading, etc. But all this can happen without breaking stuff, which is really important to me.
Hope this answers your question.
