Dashboarding - Tips and Tricks

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You may have already tried creating custom dashboards using DASH (Dashboard Application Services Hub). Here are few points which may assist you to view the dashboard exactly as you wished it to be.

• No title with transparent background

For every widget on the Dashboard you can select a skin which suits you best. Have you ever tried ‘Transparent No Title’? It just removes the widget title and the boundaries and leaves you only with the widget. This saves some space on the dashboard and becomes very handy especially when you want to show some related data by stacking the widgets close to each other. Other skin options are tailored for different needs and should be tried to determine the one which is best for you.

Once the skin is set to ‘Transparent no title’ you may wonder how to get back the ‘edit’ option. It’s easy, select the widget and then at the top right you will see a drop down button with the name ‘Widget’ which can be used as an alternative of widget’s inbuilt edit drop down.

• Themes

                 DASH currently provides 2 themes (‘IBM Design Signature’ and ‘Tivoli Dark’). By default user sees the IBM Signature theme and the themes are set in the profile preferences. Go to ‘Console Preference Profile’, click new, give a name to your profile, select the theme from the drop down, assign roles which will access this theme and just save. Now when you login with the user which has assigned roles, you will see the set theme. While setting the theme details you can anytime preview how it’s going to appear.

• Grid Size

                This is yet another important feature which can be utilized for precisely placing the widgets. Refer this blog by Ken /support/pages/node/1275592 for more details.

• Don’t set Leading Edge label if you have large number of widgets on the page.

     Gauges are one of the most used widgets while creating a Dashboard. They have an option to provide a couple of labels apart from the representing the value they are configured to. Using leading edge label at time may not suit your needs if the dashboard is complex and contains a lot of widgets. You can tradeoff the leading edge label with some extra space on your dashboard.

• Minimize the dashboard widget palette to comprehend the widget size better

           At times we feel that whatever size we have set for our dashboard widgets while constructing the dashboard is not exactly same when we save the page. This normally happens as in edit mode we have some extra options available which lessens the view area. Now when you save the page those options are gone and your widgets may appear slightly bigger than what you thought it to be! DASH has a solution for this. Once you have all the widgets on your dashboard, you can minimize the widget selector panel making all the space available for your widgets. Now once you resize and save, you will just see what you did set while in edit mode.

• Alternative to using a mouse you can use Shift+Arrow keys to resize the widgets. Arrow keys without shift will allow you to move the widget around on the page.

• Never use ‘Fluid’ page layout when you need overlapping widgets. Use ‘Proportional’ or ‘Freeform’ instead.