If you’ve been following our blogs and newsletters, you know that we first announced Web Dashboard Designer CTP a couple of months ago – with the v15.2.9 release. Briefly speaking, it’s a new control that completes the Dashboard customization stack for the Web – it enables end-users to modify existing dashboards or create new ones from scratch. In addition to that, it can also serve as a viewer and allows to switch between the two modes on the client side.
For details on features first introduced in the Web Dashboard designer and for the quick start video, refer to the announcement blog post, where you can also find the list of our goals for the v16.1 release. Now that we have Beta 2 out, it’s time to review which of those features actually made it into production.
MVC Extension … Check!
As promised, the ASP.NET MVC Extension is ready for you to try. This is where the new control will really shine, as the implementation is more in line with the MVC platform standards than with classic WebForms.
Data Source Wizard with Query Builder … Check!
End-users can now visually create their custom query to consume data in a way that helps them solve the task at hand.
Data Export … Check!
Both the WebForms Control and the MVC Extension now support data export of the entire dashboard or individual dashboard items.
Comprehensive OLAP Support … Check!
A few OLAP Support features were missing in the initial preview release and they are now all available in version 16.1 so we can announce full support for OLAP data binding. Examples of the newly supported features include Data Filtering UI and Data Binding Restrictions.
Additional UI and API Improvements
We also keep testing the new features and listening to your feedback and, based on that, the team has re-worked and optimized many aspects of server-side API and end-user UI and here are just a few examples:
- Storage API
- Field Chooser look and feel
- Drag and drop functionality
- Dashboard Item selection UI
Things We Are Still Working On
We have mostly met the goals we set for ourselves for v16.1, but there are still a few features we need to implement in order to consider the Dashboard Designer a comprehensive web editor control. During the next iteration we will work on the following:
- A way to set up custom colorization tables and rules.
- End-user editing of conditional formatting rules.
- Full support for localization.
We Would Love to Hear Your Feedback
As always, we'd love to hear from you and we'd love it even more if you could deploy the new designer in your apps and share what your application’s users think of it. With any feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to contact us via the Support Center or here in the Comments section.
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