Dashboard

The Dashboard is essentially the homepage of an application for standard users, the first page that users see when they log into an account. An account dashboard can comprise any custom widgets defined in the account, as well as any table, map, or chart report views with the "Dashboard Widget" designation. Note that any links defined in these views will be disabled on the dashboard. The screenshot below shows a sample of a well-populated dashboard.

A user can customize his or her own dashboard experience using the buttons in the top right of the screenshot shown above. The "More Widgets" button opens the following panel, where a user can choose the widgets that he or she wants to see on the dashboard.

The panel to determine which widgets appear on a user's dashboard.

The tabs on the left of this panel represent the categories of widgets that can appear on the dashboard. Even a blank account contains the "Welcome" tab, which contains only one widget, titled "Welcome Message"; as discussed on the Settings and Skins page, an account supervisor can configure the message that appears on this widget. If the account contains any reports with Dashboard Widget views, this panel will also contain a "Reports" tab, listing each dashboard view by name.

A user can only add widgets from reports for which they have the "View Report" permission; if the user lacks the permission to view a report, any dashboard widgets within that report will not appear on this panel. Note that since views are identified by their view names only, with no indication of the reports to which they belong, it is helpful to give dashboard views very specific names, to differentiate them on the Select Widgets panel.

Lastly, if any custom widgets exist in the account, they will be accessible on this panel as well. The tags of each custom widget become tabs on the Select Widgets panel where that widget can be found; in the above screenshot, all custom widgets in the account have the tag "Video". Checking the box of any widget will add that widget to the bottom of the dashboard, and unchecking a box will remove that widget from the dashboard, though this can also be accomplished by clicking the "X" button in the top right of any individual widget. On a similar note, the "-" button on each widget minimizes that widget such that only the header appears, but the widget does not disappear entirely.

A user can customize the layout of widgets on his or her dashboard, in addition to simply which widgets appear. Next to the "More Widgets" button in the top right, a user can select whether they want the widgets of the dashboard to appear in 1, 2, or 3 columns. If the number of columns on the dashboard is reduced, the width of each widget increases accordingly, and vice versa. Furthermore, a user can click and drag any widget by its header to move it into a new position on the dashboard. Lastly, each widget acts as a link to its parent report; clicking on the name of any widget will redirect a user to the View Report page for that widget. When defining a custom widget, you can optionally add a URL to which the title of the widget will link, but if none is defined, the caption of the widget will not link to anything.

As is the case with any report page, the data in the dashboard is only loaded once, when the user first navigates to the page. While the user is on the page, however, the system can continue to receive device messages, form submissions, or otherwise run routines that update application data; so, while the data the dashboard displays may have been up-to-date when the user loaded the page, it may not be current for the entire time that the user is on the page. For example, an application could update its data when it receives a device message every 60 seconds; if a user stays on the dashboard for more than a minute, the data that was correct when he or she loaded the page would become obsolete. To alleviate this concern, the dashboard provides a refresh button to the right of the "More Widgets" button. If a user presses this button, the page reload the data of each widget on a certain interval. The default interval is 10 seconds, but admin users can customize this value on the Admin -> Settings page.