Dashboarding: Secondary Widget Menu and Snap to Grid

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In this post, I want to cover two topics: the dashboard builder secondary widget menu, and how to adjust the snap to grid feature of the dashboard builder.

Have you ever used the "Transparent no title" skin on one of your widgets in the dashboard, then get frustrated because you need to edit that widget again and cannot find the the little triangle for the the widget in the upper right corner of the widget?

The image above shows two widgets.  The widget on the left has the "Transparent" skin and the widget on the right has the "Transparent no title" skin.  Notice there is no menu icon in the top right corner of the widget on the right.

There is another way to get at the menu for a widget without clicking the little triangle.  If you highlight the widget by clicking on its bounding box, you can then go to the upper right hand corner of the dashboard builder page just above the palette and get that the widget's menu.  From here, you can change the skin, edit, change the z-order, etc.  It's also quite helpful to have this menu for widgets that may be overlaying each other and you don't have direct access to the upper right corner of the widget.

While I have your attention on this part of the dashboard builder, see that "Layout" menu?  If you drill into that, you will see a "Grid Size" submenu.  This allows you to change the granularity of the snap grid for your widgets on the page.  

This comes in handy when you are trying to precisely place widgets in a particular location.  As an example, placing the "Hotspot" widget in a particular place on an image.  You may experience the widget moving once you drop it.  This is the widget snapping to the nearest grid.  If you're not happy with how your widgets are being positioned, try changing the "Grid Size" percentage.  The smaller the percentage, the finer the grid becomes and you can be a bit more precise with your layout.


Hope this helps!