Software dashboards – much like the dashboard in your car – provide you with instant, summary information on the “health” of a system. Of course the term “health” can mean many things. If you are Amazon, it can mean information on orders/minute, stock levels/category etc. If you are an ISP it can mean things like total uptime/server, memory usage/server, etc. Whatever it means to you, it is important that you know about changes to it immediately and that is where the software dashboard comes in.
New in V2010 Vol2, XAF will provide the ability to create a dashboard view. Let’s take a look at how that will be done.
Using the FeatureCenter application, open the ModelEditor and add a new DashboardView to the Views node:
Then, we need to add some items to our dashboard:
Next we can select a view, that we want to be shown as an item, and a criteria. Let's add the Employees list view.
KPIs (more on these in a future blog post) can also be easily placed on dashboards. Let's add another DashboardVIewItem, and select KpiInstance_Chart_DetailView as its View. We'll use a Criteria to select a particular KPI:
If we have a previously created customized view (for example a list view shown as a chart using ChartListEditor), it can be placed onto a dashboard in the same way:
Now we can layout our dashboard as required. Click on the layout node, then invoke the layout customization dialog:
Next, we need to create a navigation item which will open our dashboard:
Finally, run the application and look at the dashboard in action:
Runtime customization is also supported. Invoke the layout customization for the dashboard and click the “Add” button to create an item. In the opened View selector, you can choose an object type and a view. Let's choose the “Sales by Countries” list view:
After clicking OK it appears on the Customization form, and can be dropped onto the dashboard:
And, after some customization our dashboard looks like this:
Dashboards are supported for ASP.NET applications as well:
That’s all for this sneak peek, until next time, happy XAF'ing :-)