How the application was developed

The data model of the Happiness application looks like what is shown in the following screenshot:

This is an extremely simple data model that only contains one table of real data, Happy Planet Index, and an additional table listing all countries, World.shhp/Features. The second table has one record per country and holds the map information—the shapes of the country—used in the map object in the user interface.

In this app, the data table has exactly one record per country—a record that contains the relevant information for a given country at a given moment. However, this is not always the situation. More often, the data table contains data for many countries over many points in time, for example, one record per combination of a country and a year. This results in several lines per country.

Dimensions

There are not many fields that can be used as dimensions. The three available fields are region, subregion, and country. The world is split into 7 regions and 19...