Create New Dashboard or Scorecard in White Cup BI

While White Cup BI has lots of existing dashboards and scorecards to use, there may be times when you want to create your own dashboard or scorecard with custom content. This article will show you the common tasks needed to create one of your own.

Dashboards vs Scorecards

While they are similar, there is an important difference between dashboards and scorecards it is worth mentioning here.  A dashboard is an overall view of a topic while a scorecard is limited to a specific identifier.  So while a dashboard may look at all of a sales rep's customers, a scorecard would be limited to looking at just one customer as a time.

A dashboard is never prompted whereas a scorecard usually is.  The only time a scorecard is not prompted is when a user's security permissions are limited to a single identifier that is also the basis for the scorecard.  For example, if a scorecard is based on Sales Rep and a user is limited by permissions to only seeing their own sales rep data, then the scorecard will display their data without prompting (effectively inputting the prompt itself).  The system is smart enough to not prompt the user when only one choice is available.

What is a Dashboard?

A dashboard is a collection of grids, charts, stop lights, cells and other data representations. White Cup BI has both dashboards and scorecards. A dashboard is intended to provide an overview of a topic such as Company Health in the below Executive Review Dashboard. It doesn’t prompt for a value when a user opens it and the objects do not need to be based on the same identifier.

What is a Scorecard?

A Scorecard looks at a specific entity such as a product in this product 360 Scorecard. All of the objects on the Scorecard must be based on the same identifier. Generally speaking, Scorecards will prompt for a value unless you're drilling across to a Scorecard from within another report, dashboard or in certain security situations.

For the rest of this article, we'll use dashboard to mean both scorecards and dashboards, except where specifically noted.

Permissions

Before you can create or edit a dashboard, your user account must have permission to write to at least one dashboard library.  See your administrator for assistance with this.

Go to the user management section of the Admin tab to make changes. Next, click on the Dashboard Library section of a user or a Template.

They need permission for at least one place to write down their modified dashboards. If we give them write access to the same Library where the dashboard is located, they'll be able to override the original dashboard. This might be what you want, but for the standard content that comes with White Cup BI, we suggest leaving those libraries read-only and create a new library that users can write to.

Create a New Dashboard Library

New libraries can be created in the Manage Library section by going to Dashboard Libraries and clicking on the “Add new library” link.

*Once the new library exists, you can give users write access. Once your User has write access to at least one dashboard Library, they will have the “Modify Dashboard” link available when viewing a dashboard. Clicking the link opens the dashboard in the Visual Edit Mode to customize it.

Create a new blank dashboard

On the Dashboards tab, click the New button in the menu and select Full Screen Dashboard.  This will start the wizard.

On the first page of the wizard, you'll can select the number of columns the dashboard will have (2,3, or 4), the hypercube the dashboard will be based on (for security purposes), and whether or not this will be a scorecard.  

By default, it is a dashboard. If you want this to be a Scorecard, select the identifier to be used as the basis of the scorecard in the dropdown menu.  The difference between a scorecard and a dashboard is that a scorecard prompts the viewer for for a specific value that becomes the basis of the scorecard.  This is used to view information about things such as a specific sales rep, a warehouse, or a product.  The available identifiers will be those available within the particular hypercube you selected as the basis above.  Ex:

Click Next to proceed.

On the last page of the wizard, choose a Library where you want to save the dashboard, give it a name, and click finish.

Once finished, you'll be presented with the new and empty dashboard.  It will look like this.

Create new sections, objects, and horizontal dividers

Across the top are buttons to create horizontal lines for visually dividing areas of the dashboard, sections for grouping individual objects that should go together, and new dashboard objects.

Horizontal Line

The horizontal line button adds a new line that is the width of a single column. You can add as many lines as you'd like.  Each line can be moved by hovering your mouse over it and click dragging it to the new location.  Use the trashcan icon (displayed when hovering over the line) to delete the line from the dashboard.

Section

Clicking the new Section button will prompt you to give the section a name. This field can be left blank if you wish.  Read more about descriptions here.

This will add a section to your dashboard.  You can add as many sections as you need.  Just like the horizontal line, you can drag and drop the placement of a section as you wish.  If there are any objects within the section , they will be moved with the section.  Both objects and horizontal lines can be placed within a section.

Conditional Container

The option for adding a conditional container is an advanced feature intended for White Cup development.  However, you can learn more about it here.

Dashboard Objects

Clicking the Dashboard Object button will start the wizard to create a new object to add to a dashboard.  Your 

Moving and Editing Objects

All objects on a dashboard can be moved while in the visual edit mode (the default mode when a new dashboard is created).  Hover your mouse over the object then drag and drop the object to its new location.  See steps 1-4 on the Dashboard Layout article for more details.

When hovering over an object, the gear icon will display.  Clicking this icon will grant you access to an object settings and options.

Saving

After you have added objects to your dashboard, you can save it to any library you have write permission to, and you can save it with the same or a new name.  If you are saving it with the same name to the original library location, you'll be prompted to overwrite the existing dashboard.

Viewing

Once you have saved the dashboard, you can view it to see how it displays to a regular user by clicking the View Dashboard button in the menu.

Editing

With the dashboard created, you can continue to edit or come back at a later time and make changes.

Here is a link to the Customizing Dashboards article which will assist you.

If you need to make manual changes to the MWML (underlying code) of the dashboard, we have a reference article here.  This is an advanced task and should only be done by advanced users.