Digital Growth Charts App

This is a flutter wrapper for the RCPCH digital growth charts.

Getting Started

The RCPCH Digital Growth Charts App is a Flutter 3 project, written in Dart 3.9. Flutter is a mobile application development framework which allows us to develop in a single codebase and from this deploy native apps for iOS, Android, web and desktop.

Local development setup

1. Download flutter and Dart with dependencies (iOS and Android SDKs) here. You will need to create a virtual device to demo the app on, or connect a real device.

2. Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/rcpch/digital-growth-charts-app/tree/main

cd digital-growth-charts-app

1. Install dependencies

dart pub get

2. Create a .env file. The app consumes the RCPCH Growth API so you will need a key from https://growth.rcpch.ac.uk/integrator/making-api-calls/. Save a .env file in the root of your project with the following variables:

DGC_BASE_URL=https://api.rcpch.ac.uk/growth/v1
DGC_API_KEY=

# Only required for login - work ongoing
MICROSOFT_LOGIN_CLIENT_ID=
MICROSOFT_LOGIN_OAUTH_SERVER=

# Only required if testing saving data - work ongoing
DGC_STORAGE_BASE_URL=https://localhost

1. Run the application (web browser)

You must specify the web port for redirection after login to work correctly.

flutter run -d chrome --web-port=8989

1. Run the application (Android emulator)

flutter emulators
1 available emulator:

Id                  • Name                • Manufacturer • Platform

Medium_Phone_API_36 • Medium Phone API 36 • Generic      • android

To run an emulator, run 'flutter emulators --launch <emulator id>'.
To create a new emulator, run 'flutter emulators --create [--name xyz]'.

You can find more information on managing emulators at the links below:
  https://developer.android.com/studio/run/managing-avds
  https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/avdmanager

flutter emulators --launch Medium_Phone_API_36

You must wait until the emulator has booted up and is showing you the Android home screen.

flutter run

The first time you do this it will download all software build tools ever created so expect it to take ages.

The app has been tested on:

• iOS (@eatyourpeas)
• Android (@pacharanero)
• Linux Desktop (@pacharanero)

Some installation notes

• If your Dart SDK isn't the correct version (at the time of writing it needs to be >3) then you can run flutter upgrade to update both Flutter and Dart. For some reason this was even required on a new install of Flutter in one case.

• The Android Virtual Device Manager defaults to a very low amount of disk space for virtual Android devices, and quite often this disk space is insufficient to actually load an app into, causing failure of the app to run. There will be a 'not enough disk space' or similar error. To increase disk space, you can Edit the Virtual Device in Android Studio, select 'Advanced' and increase the device disk storage to something bigger.

• If you are testing saving data, you must accept the Caddy self-signed certificate by visiting the API running on localhost directly in the browser in a new tab.

Troubleshooting

The Android emulator exited with code 1 during startup
Android emulator stderr:
Address these issues and try again.

Try cold booting the Emulator. Go to the Android Virtual Device Manager in Android Studio ("View" > "Device Manager") and select "Cold Boot".