No Data Found in Dashboard

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This blog talks about how to resolve a common scenario you may encounter when configuring widgets on a dashboard in the IBM Dashboard Application Services Hub, the "No Data Found “ on DASH Widgets" message.There are many times you may see no data getting displayed in your widget and the widget may appear blank

Do not panic by seeing a blank widget . The reason could be a very minor one and here is how you find out. Follow this check list and the problem could be due to any of these situations.

1.The data provider could be down for some reason. It could even be a firewall authentication problem incase of a remote provider. Check whether the provider (either local or remote) is up and you are able to connect to the provider properly by verifying the status of the provider in the connections page.

2.The provider could be up and running but there is no data or no items or no response coming from it. Check that the provider is returning a proper response. When the dataset is empty, then no data is the proper response. The provider might be having some data but there could be a filter condition set on it in such a way that none of the data matches the filter. The preliminary data filter is one such filter set in the quick edit and it is an optional one based on the provider. The data is also dependent on the optional data set parameters configured in the quick edit page.
 

3.There could be a response coming from the provider but the response may not be proper. It may not be in the expected format or the data may be invalid. For instance in the case of a List widget, there is a “Status” object defined and used to show status for each item in the widget. But the provider may have a string or numeric object to represent the status. This will fail and the status column is not shown as the widget accepts only a properly formatted “Status” object to display status. In case of table widget, it displays “No items to display” when the data from the provider is not in the expected format. In your browser, use add-on tools (e.g, Firebug for Firefox) to find out what response has been returned and what data it contains.

For example, if the provider name is "DEMO" and the data source name is "any" and the dataset name is "DEMO", then look for a GET request like "https://ipaddress:port/providers/DEMO/datasources/any/datasets/DEMO?…;

4.The response may have data but it may have invalid characters. For instance, in case of a table widget if the data has the escape characters like "\n","\r","\p", it will not display any data in the screen. It will not load when the data has characters like single quotes, etc.

5.There could also be a case where the widget got loaded through a page launch. When the context filter of the page launch has been configured in such a way that it returns no data, then in that case also the widget appears blank. This can be confirmed by analyzing the items request in browser.

6. If the widget that is not displaying data is the topology widget and you are using an older version of Internet Explorer like Internet Explorer 8, this can sometimes be the result of a video driver issue. You can try changing a setting in the Internet Explorer's internet options to work around this issue. Enable the software rendering setting of "Accelerated Graphics" in Internet Options > Advanced Tab and reload the page. You should now be able to see the widget with data