WP7 App Showcase: World Indicators

In this app showcase Windows Phone developer Dan Ardelean talks about his app, World Indicators. He built this app to leverage the free World Bank data made available through the azure data market. The app uses azure data services as well as controls from ComponentOne Studio for Windows Phone.

The World Development indicators database is the primary World Bank database for development data from officially-recognized international sources. It provides a comprehensive selection of economic, social and environmental indicators, drawing on data from the World Bank and more than 30 partner agencies. The database covers more than 900 indicators for 210 economies with data back to 1960 in many cases.

The World Bank database has so much data in it, that building an app around this data while allowing the user to access any combination can be a challenge. Dan pulls it off by allowing extensive end-user customization. In this app you can choose any number of countries, indicators and years in a checked list box fashion. An indicator is something measured like land area, precipitation, crop production, net trade in goods, family incomes, water pollution, mortality rates and so much more. Dan exposes these indicators via multiple data sources that you can tap into, such as Education Statistics, Gender Statistics, Global Economic Monitor, Health Nutrition and Population Statistics, Public Sector Debt, etc. You can modify your selection on the fly. Then you can view the combined data tables and charts of the selected data. Dan took advantage of the C1FlexGrid and C1Chart controls to graphically display the data. Here are his instructions:

1. In the main windows you will have to select the countries, the indicators and the years you want to data for. For that you will have to press the appbar buttons: countries, indicators and years. Each of the sections is composed by a pivot with two items. The first pivotItem contais the values you can choose from and the second pivot are what you have already selected. To select an item you just have to press the plus button present on the item row. On the countries and indicators tab you can also press the name and you will get further details about the item (data about the country and a more detailed description for the indicators. For the indicators they are filtered by Datasources and in each datasource is divided topics. If the datasource doesn’t have topics you will only see the All item. At anytime you can go on the selected pivot and clear all your items or just the one you don’t want anymore.
2. If you selected at least: one country, one indicator and one year you can go to the second page using the arrow appbar button which is getdata. The second window has on the top a listpicker where you can change the indicator from the ones you have previously selected and two items: data and chart. The data contains a flexgrid with the data for the selected indicator, years and countries and the chart is the corresponding chart -you will have to press the headers “ chart” or “data” to move between the items as I am using the scrollviewer for the chart and flexgrid. Inside the grid you have the first column frozen. The app supports both landscape and portrait.

[gallery link="file"] As a test, I looked up the average age at first marriage of men vs women in Canada for 2006. Turns out that age is about 26 for women and 28 for men. In another query I can compare mortality rates of Gabon vs Ecuador and obesity in children under the age of 5 in the United States. It would be easy to build an app that just focused on one data set such as those, but Dan has given us an app that has EVERYTHING, it's astonishing! Download the free app from the marketplace.

1. In the main windows you will have to select the countries, the indicators and the years you want to data for. For that you will have to press the appbar buttons: countries, indicators and years. Each of the sections is composed by a pivot with two items. The first pivotItem contais the values you can choose from and the second pivot are what you have already selected. To select an item you just have to press the plus button present on the item row. On the countries and indicators tab you can also press the name and you will get further details about the item (data about the country and a more detailed description for the indicators. For the indicators they are filtered by Datasources and in each datasource is divided topics. If the datasource doesn’t have topics you will only see the All item. At anytime you can go on the selected pivot and clear all your items or just the one you don’t want anymore.

If you selected at least: one country, one indicator and one year you can go to the second page using the arrow appbar button which is getdata. The second window has on the top a listpicker where you can change the indicator from the ones you have previously selected and two items: data and chart. The data contains a flexgrid with the data for the selected indicator, years and countries and the chart is the corresponding chart -you will have to press the headers “ chart” or “data” to move between the items as I am using the scrollviewer for the chart and flexgrid. Inside the grid you have the first column frozen. The app supports both landscape and portrait.