Custom Web Application development for Robotic Data Dashboard

The UDS team loves to fulfill new customer requests and is not afraid of them. We are always ready to apply our many years of experience and modern technologies from Microsoft. We want to share with you a new challenge we received from our client.

PowerApps is a flexible low-code platform that enables a lot of workloads. But sometimes, customers want customized, task-oriented applications for external parties (partners and customers). For some of these scenarios, it is better to use custom web applications.

It is also an option when we need to create custom parts in PowerApps itself, such as a custom scheduling dashboard. We will discuss this in the following articles, but now let’s look into the portal for the robotic data view we created for one of our Finnish customers.

Received a challenge from the client

So, the customer is a Finnish company producing and maintaining automation modules for manufacturing. One of the services they wanted to include in their offer was the ability for customers to have an online dashboard to view data collected from their modules.

In partnership with Platform of Trust, we developed an API to access their data and started to create an actual application. The main functionality of the application included:

• New user registration process.
• User management functionality for admin.
• End user UI with dashboard and reports.

The technologies we used

In our developments, we often use Microsoft Azure Cloud due to its flexibility and loads of different modules and automation. In this project, we applied the following technologies:

• Azure B2C to enable user registration/authentication processes.
• Azure Containers to host actual web applications.
• Azure Pipelines to build and deploy applications.

On top of Azure, we also used custom web technologies to build the logic of the application:

• React.js for the front-end part.
• .NET for the backend.

Actual result

The project development took two months. As a result, the customer received an end-to-end working application that can be fully managed internally, including user self-registration, access management, and data publishing. On top of technical competence, we also have an experienced UI/UX design team that makes our applications intuitive and easy/pleasant to use. Let us demonstrate some workloads:

User Management Screen

On the user management screen admin can assign licenses to users, specify their access duration according to the contract, or provide admin privileges. Also, the admin interface allows to impersonate users and view their data in user mode.

To register a new user, the administrator receives a request and must configure a license so that users can see data from their automation modules. After the configuration, the user receives a confirmation notification and can use the application.

Robotic Data Dashboard

Users with appropriate licenses can access dashboards and diagrams with robotic data.

Let`S Summarize

We delivered a fully functional application with embedded user and license management technologies in two months. Modern technologies and deployment models like Azure Cloud and Azure B2C simplified integration into the corporate infrastructure.

As a result, the client received additional services for themselves and their customers. And, of course, convenient for visual perception and a useful robotic data dashboard.

The greatest reward for us is a client satisfied with the result.