In major version v19.1 we will finalize the process of replacing the old Web Dashboard Viewer with the new Web Dashboard Control. This means that the Web Dashboard Viewer will not be included in our installation packages starting with v19.1.
If your projects still use the Web Dashboard Viewer, you need to migrate soon. Please find instructions linked below.
The Old: Web Dashboard Viewer
The Web Dashboard Viewer was introduced in 2012 to show dashboards in web applications. Designing dashboards was only possible at the time using the WinForms Dashboard Designer or the Visual Studio Dashboard Designer.
For several years we maintained the control actively and it was used by many of our customers in ASP.NET WebForms and MVC applications. The control evolved to support new widget types and APIs, but it became apparent that major architectural design changes were needed.
The New: Web Dashboard Control
The Web Dashboard Control was first announced in early 2016
and then delivered as a CTP product in v16.1 and a release version in v16.2, targeting ASP.NET WebForms and MVC. A client-side JavaScript solution was delivered in v17.2 and an ASP.NET Core/.NET Core version in v18.1.
Early announcements focused mainly on the designer functionality for web applications - this was new at the time, and today around 34% of our web-based customers don’t create desktop applications for design purposes since the web designer satisfies all their requirements.
In addition to the designer feature set, the Web Dashboard Control also turned out to be more scalable, cache-friendly and memory-efficient than the old Web Dashboard Viewer, thanks to its RESTful architecture.
The option of switching between viewer and designer at runtime is used by 57% of our customers by now, which proves that we were on the right track when we decided to integrate all this functionality.
The Web Dashboard Control is actively developed and it has gained major new functionality in the last two years, including Custom Dashboard Items, Saving and Restoring Client State and Tab Support and Neutral Filter Mode.
Migration to the Web Dashboard Control
With our release v19.1, the old Web Dashboard Viewer will not be part of the distribution anymore. It is therefore important for you to change your projects to the Web Dashboard Control. The two links below lead to articles that describe the required steps in detail.
Read this if your project uses the old ASP.NET WebForms viewer:
How to migrate from ASPxDashboardViewer to ASPxDashboard working in ViewerOnly mode
Read this if your project uses the old ASP.NET MVC viewer: How to migrate from DashboardViewerExtension to DashboardExtension working in ViewerOnly mode
Our support is here to assist you
If you have any problems with the migration process, please create a ticket in Support Center and our support engineers will be happy to help you.
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