useR! 2024

Despite widespread adoption of tools such as Shiny and dplyr, creating dashboards in R remains challenging for non-coding developers. Solutions like PowerBI or Tableau, while popular, are proprietary and expensive, offer limited reproducibility, and have restricted integration with the R ecosystem. To address this gap, we introduce blockr, an open-source dashboard builder (https://github.com/blockr-org). blockr simplifies the construction of parameterized data pipelines as a web application, enabling collaboration and easy sharing of results through self-contained code generation. We emphasize modularity by decomposing pipelines into 'blocks'. These 'blocks' can be assembled into 'stacks', which can be connected so that the output of one stack serves as the input for others. This architecture results in a reactive dashboard that allows upstream changes to cascade through the analysis, providing instant feedback to the user. General-purpose blocks provided by blockr can be combined with user-created blocks to expand functionality to use-case specific needs. This approach makes it easy to leverage the vast and mature ecosystem of R packages.