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DHIS2 Mobile apps implementation with Flutter

~ Eric Chingalo, Systems Developer - HISP Tanzania

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  • Primarily at HISP Tanzania, mobile application solutions are implemented by using the DHIS2 capture.
  • Due to complexity and very specific user requirements, there are some projects that requires mobile application development.

Mobile apps implementation

Background

  • Most of mobile applications solutions, are developed targeting both iOS and Android platforms.
  • Initially development of mobile application, was done by using a javascript framework called Ionic.
  • In early 2020, with the rise of popularity and community support in the flutter framework, the development team decided to migrate to using this new framework.

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Mobile apps development

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What is Flutter?

  • Flutter was first released in 2017, and has grown rapidly in popularity ever since.
  • Flutter apps are written in Dart programming language, that is a object-oriented, garbage-collected, and class-based C-styled programming language.
  • Dart is strongly typed and hence more developer friend.
  • In addition to blazing fast performance of flutter apps, its wide community makes it easy to get started with development.
  • The architecture of flutter apps is based on Widgets, that defines specific visual elements that makes up the app. In fluttle everything is a widget.

Flutter is an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase.

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Why Flutter?

  • Fast performance: Flutter apps are built using natively compiled code, which means they perform fast and smoothly, even on older devices.

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  • Hot reload: Flutter's hot reload feature enables developers to see the changes they make to their code instantly in the app, saving time and improving productivity.

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  • Single codebase for multiple platforms: Flutter allows developers to write a single codebase that can run on both iOS and Android, reducing the time and effort required to develop apps for multiple platforms.

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  • Large and active community: Flutter has a large and active community of developers, who contribute to the framework and provide support and resources for building great apps

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DHIS2 mobile apps with Flutter

  • Initially we had all the https services, local database implementations and numerous utility functions handled within the code base of an application.

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  • Implementation of of these applications utilized the DHIS2 web API to ensure connection with a DHIS2 instance.

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  • This enabled us to build flutter applications that can support connection with the DHIS2 server through the exposed web API, offline data entry and synchronization with online DHIS2 server.

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Quick Demo

Here is the link to github repository: https://github.com/hisptz/dhis2_flutter_demo

In the following short demo we will see:

  • Authentication handling in HTTP.
  • Fetching data using DHIS2 API.
  • Sending data into DHIS2 through its API.

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The demo will involve user authentication, programs exploration and saving program summary on data store.

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Our Experience So far

  • With multiple applications to maintain, we decided to develop a flutter package for the common user interface widgets to improve fast app development and maintenance.

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  • Additionally to support offline evaluation of program rules and program indicator, DHIS2 data models and other basic utilities, we had to also develop a dart utilities library.

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  • Due to these challenges, two packages the development of flutter apps became faster and easily maintainable.

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Our Dart and Flutter Packages

These packages can be found at https://pub.dev/

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Examples of DHIS2 apps we built

LODIIS (Lesotho OVC and DREAMS Integrated Information System ) mobile app

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Examples of DHIS2 apps we built

Offline Covid19 vaccination mobile application

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Examples of DHIS2 apps we built

Tanzania MoH reports app

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Examples of DHIS2 apps we built

Android

iOS

Tanzania National Health Portal

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Way Forward

  • We are currently improving and extending the capabilities of the two packages to cater for more use cases.

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  • We are planning to extended the use of these packages in other flutter supported platforms such as Windows, macOS and Linux.

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  • We are planning to have a complete DHIS2 Flutter SDK that could support for building DHIS2 mobile applications using this powerful flutter framework.

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THANK YOU!