Personalized dashboard views

The 12.1.1 release comes with a new feature for simplified customization of complex dashboard designs.

A dashboard view is a feature that references a base dashboard, which contains your individual filters and settings. It supports the following customization features:

  • Filters
  • Brushing, excluding local filters on individual visualizations
  • Bookmarks, including the ability to set the currently selected tab

You can create dashboard views only from an open dashboard and from within the dashboard studio and only against saved dashboards. If the open dashboard is saved, a Save as dashboard view option appears in the save menu:

Selecting the "Save as dashboard view" option from the save menu.

This operation works as a standard Save as operation. When the operation is complete, the original dashboard is still displayed. To access the new dashboard view, you must open it manually from the content navigation panel.

The dashboard views have a different icon than regular dashboards. It includes an eye overlay, which is similar to a report views icon:

A dashboard view icon has an eye overlay, which differentiates it from the regular dashboard icon.

You can customize a dashboard view by changing the brushing, filter, or bookmarks, and then saving the view. However, the dashboard view is essentially in a Consume mode and you can't switch to the authoring mode. It also means that you can't access the metadata tree of the dashboard view or add extra filter controls to the filter dock. If you want your users to apply filters in a metadata column, you must first add that column in the base dashboard, even if you don't initially select any filter values.

Any updates that you make to a base dashboard automatically appear in the dashboard view, except for the custom options that you define in the dashboard view itself. You can see the changes the next time that you open the dashboard view. For example, if you delete a visualization from the main dashboard, it no longer appears in the dashboard view.

The Save as dashboard view operation also creates a noneditable bookmark in the dashboard view. This bookmark includes the state of filters and brushing that you applied in the dashboard at the time when the dashboard view was created or last saved. When you open the dashboard view and don't select any other bookmark, this bookmark is automatically selected.

A bookmark with the state of filters and brushing that you applied in the dashboard at the time when the dashboard view was created.

The dashboard views not only consume bookmarks from the base dashboards, but they also can have their own bookmarks. You can create them in the same way as in standard dashboards. The Cognos® Analytics UI differentiates between Shared bookmarks, so all bookmarks from the base dashboards, and My bookmarks, which are bookmarks from the dashboard view.

A difference in the UI between "Shared bookmarks" and "My bookmarks".

If you delete the base dashboard, you can't open the dashboard view and its entry is disabled in the content navigation. All attempts to access that dashboard view by entering its URL address directly into a browser, result in an error message. Also, the Source dashboard property appears as Unavailable, for example:

The "Sales dashboard (North America)" dashboard view is disabled in the content navigation list because its source dashboard has been deleted.
The "Source dashboard" is set to "Unavailable" because the base dashboard has been deleted.

To fix this issue, use the Set source dashboard button and add a link to a new base dashboard.

Tip: If the source dashboard exists, you can check the Source dashboard property to determine which dashboard is the base of your view. You can also change the source dashboard anytime.