AxisVM-Dash

Template repo for interactive dashboards using AxisVM as a batch process.

This repository does not accept pull request, use it as a template to start new projects.

Overview

The repo contains a minimal webapp built with Plotly Dash. It provides examples to almost all basic components necessary to build interactive webapps with high-quality visualizations of AxisVM calculations, such as

• examples for usage of basic Dash compoments to build an interactive dashboard with callbacks and advanced event handling, including

  • input components of various kinds in the form of a collapsable navigation panel
  • a detailed navigation bar
  • facilities for 2d and 3d visualizations using Plotly
  • a table that reacts to user interaction (click the cells to update the plot)

• calculation of a single-supported rectangular plate with PyAxisVM, the official python package for AxisVM

• a communication solution between the frontend and the backend using Python's threading library

Usage

It is highly recommended to create a dedicated virtual enviroment for every new project. Using the built-in venv package:

>>> python -m venv .venv

then activate the enviroment with

>>> .\.venv\Scripts\activate

To update pip type

>>> python -m pip install --upgrade pip

Install the dependencies from requirements.txt

>>> pip install -r requirements.txt

To launch the application locally, type

>>> python app.py

Notes

It worths noting that Dash:

• has an enterprise level solution that allows for low-code to no-code development

• integrates well with Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehouse service offered by Amazon Web Services

The repo contains some files for deployment on production scale WSGI servers. If you only want to deploy locally, ignore these.

Issues

1. At the moment the 2d contour plot is a little bit ugly. This is because nodal values are queried only at the corner nodes of 6-noded triangle elements used in AxisVM, and this makes the point-based approximation (it doesn't use the topology) a bit awkward.

2. Currently only displacement components are plotted. This is because internal forces can only be queried element-wise. There are two possible solutions for this:

   • implement smoothing
   • use per-element colouring of cells

I'll solve these issues, but the soluton requires some work to be done on the PyAxisVM package.

Resources

• Plotly Dash

  • https://dash.plotly.com/
  • https://dash-bootstrap-components.opensource.faculty.ai/

• AxisVM python package

  • https://github.com/AxisVM/pyaxisvm

• Themes and CSS customization

  • https://dash-bootstrap-components.opensource.faculty.ai/docs/themes/
  • https://bootswatch.com/