Dashboards

A dashboard is a part of an application that is designed to be easy to read and control (similar to a car's dashboard). Its function is to provide a "bird's eye view" of what is going on in the application (and its surroundings).

In the CrossmarX Application Engine a dashboard consists of one or more pages (presented as tab panels). Each tab panel consists of rectangular blocks. Each block contains a small piece of information. The source of this information may be the applications database or an external source. When many external sources are used, the dashboards role is like a portal application.

How to create a dashboard

A dashboard can only be created by the application manager. Click the "Dashboard pages" button in the backstage, then create a new page. You have to set one or more user groups, otherwise the page will NOT be displayed. You can add the number of rows.
A page consists of rows of blocks. You can add blocks by pressing the "Add dashboard block"-button in the details view of a row. A block can have a title and should have content. Content can contain (a combination of) the following items:

  • html or velocity content
    HTML code, that may contain velocity. In case you have a velocity script on file, you can also use #parse('/myapp/myfile').
  • a stored query
    It is possible to select a stored query. The query results can be shown in real time, but you can also schedule the queries to be cached once a day or once an hour. For time-consuming queries this will speed up the dashboards. You can add a filter field so you can change value of the filter on the dashboard. More on queries here.
  • Velocity file
    A direct url to a Velocity file
  • a gadget
    A gadget is a small piece of web content that can be placed in a dashboard block. Gadgets can be defined independently from a particular dashboard, and added to a list of available gadgets. When defining a particular block, gadgets can be selected from this list to be added.

It's possible to change the column of a block. See image below:


 

At the details of a block you can specify a Velocity file at 'Content url', see image below

 

 

How to open the dashboard?

The shorthand to open the dashboard is /engine/dashboard. If a user has more dashboard pages, the pages will be shown as tabs. To open a specific page with a url, use /engine?service=dashboard&cmd=open&page=PAGE_ID, with PAGE_ID the id of the specific dashboard page.