Dashboard Editing in MITS Discover

This video is taken from the MITS Discover Admin training course.  The full course can be found at learning.mits.com.

 

 

 

Transcript:

Most users of MITS Discover will either have a dashboard or a scorecard as their landing page, or they'll end up using one or more of them on a regular basis.  While we've included many preconfigured dashboards and scorecards, your users will want to be able to modify the existing dashboards or create new ones of their own.  In this video, we'll look at how to do exactly that.

 

As you may recall from previous videos, a dashboard is a collection of grids, charts, stoplights, cells, and other data representations. 

 

MITS Discover uses both dashboards and scorecards.

 

A dashboard is intended to provide an overview of  topic, such as company health in this Executive Review Dashboard.  It doesn't prompt for a value when a user opens it and the objects do not need to all be based on the same identifier. 

 

A scorecard looks at a specific entity, such as a product in this Product 360 scorecard.  All of the objects on a scorecard must be based on the same identifier.  Generally speaking, scorecards will prompt for a value unless you are drilling across to a scorecard from within another report of dashboard, or in certain security situations as discussed in the Understanding Security video.

 

For the remainder of this video, we'll use the term dashboard to mean either a dashboard or a scorecard except where these is a specific difference between the two.

 

Before a user can modify a dashboard, they must first have permission to write to at least one library.  Let's go over to the User Management section of the Admin tab and see how that works.

 

We're in the Dashboard Libraries section of this user.  While they have access to read any of the dashboard libraries, they don't have any permission to write to any of them.  This means the "Modify" option will not be available to them.  They need permission for at least one place to write down their modified dashboard.

 

If you give them write access to the same where a dashboard is located, they will be able to overwrite the existing dashboard.  This might be what you want.  But for the standard content that comes with MITS, we suggest leaving those libraries Read Only and create a new library the users can write to.

 

New libraries can be created in the Manage Libraries section, going to Dashboard Libraries, and clicking the Add New Library link.  Once it exists, you can give users write access.

 

Once a user has write access to at least one Dashboard library, they'll have the Modify Dashboard link available when viewing a dashboard.  Clicking the link opens the dashboard in the Visual Edit mode.

 

Now that you're in the Visual Editor, there are some new options available to you on the dashboard's menu bar.

 

If additional permissions have been enabled, Manual Edit allows you to make changes to the dashboards HTML and MWML, or MITS Web Markup Language.  This is generally a task reserved for advanced users and beyond the scope of this video.  If you're interested in learning more about MWML, contact support@mits.com.

 

Change Prompting in the Edit Mode allows you to change the identifier that a scorecard is based on and prompts for when a user opens it.  In this case we are looking at a dashboard, so there is no prompting.  You can change this dashboard into a scorecard by adding a prompt here.  MITS Discover would then prompt the user for a value when the open the scorecard and insert that prompt at the top of all the drilldown paths for all of the objects in the dashboard.  But if the drilldown path doesn't exist, it will break that object.

 

The PDF Page Size allows you to control the size of the PDF export in pixels.  If you have a dashboard that is a little too large to fit on a single page when exporting to PDF, you can use this feature to adjust the sizing.  It will take a little trial and error to get it right.

 

View Dashboard takes you back to the standard viewing mode.  If you have made any changes, you'll be prompted to save those changes prior to switching modes.

 

Under the title are three new buttons.  Horizontal Line adds a new divider you can use to visually separate objects.

 

Like all new objects, it gets added to the upper left corner.  Hover over the line, then click and drag it to its new location.

 

Similarly, Section adds a new container for grouping related objects.  It has a title bar you can edit.  You can drag objects into the section just like we moved the horizontal line.

 

While in the visual edit mode, all objects are eligible for drag and drop.  Let's move some objects from elsewhere on the dashboard to our new section.

 

In addition to moving objects, many new dashboard objects can be created from here using the Dashboard Object button.

 

Clicking the button will start the wizard.  The steps of the wizard will depend on the object type you select.

 

A grid object is a way to show some or all of a standard report.  Like the Top 10 Customers object.

 

A Cell is just a single value from a report, such at the Open Value.

 

A stoplight is just like a cell, but also includes a visual indicator that changes color based on ranges you can set in its configuration.

 

A Time Comparison object shows the value of one ore more metrics for two time periods and the trend or difference between those times periods.

 

And a chart object is just like a grid object in that it is displaying a previously generated chart.

 

Let's add a grid.  We'll pick a report library, and then a report.  The grid gets added to the top left corner.  But let's move it over to the Sales column.

 

Every object has buttons to modify, duplicate, and delete it.  The options available will depend on the object type.

 

For this grid object, let's clip this to only show the first five rows.  Since this report is already sorted, that will give us our top five locations.

 

Let's also add a column for average Sales.

 

If you're familiar with MQL, the MITS Query Language, you can also manually modify the report displayed in the dashboard as well as the report the object links to using the Query and Report boxes.

 

Remember, each object as its own set of options and the options available will depend on the object type.  Not all options are available for all objects.

 

Don't forget to save your changes before exiting the editor.

 

Now your new, modified dashboard is ready to use.

 

And that is an overview of the visual editor in MITS Discover.