Dashboards: Building custom chart reports

What is it? 

ITONICS Dashboard provides you with the opportunity to create custom at-a-glance views of key performance indicators relevant to your particular objectives. They help you to cut through your application and reflect the most important indicators on one page.

Learn here how to configure your own charts and dashboard pages.

How does it work? 

To configure your own Dashboards, go to the Settings Wheel > System Administration > Dashboard Configuration.

Note: If you can't see this menu point in your settings, you may not have permission for it.
Ask your Customer Innovation Success Manager for further information in this case.

The Dashboard Configuration consists of two Tabs:

• The Chart Configuration lets you create new charts which can be placed afterward inside the Dashboard pages.
• The Dashboard View Configuration lets you add and organize charts to your custom dashboards.

Creating own charts

Charts are visual representations of data. 

To create a new Chart, Go to the Settings Wheel > System Administration > Dashboard Configuration and Click on the tab “Chart Configuration”. If you click on "Add Chart", a create page opens. Here you need to add:

• A concise name for your chart e.g. "Trend Segmentation" (1)
• A chart type e.g. "Pie Chart" (2)
• The element type the chart is referring to. E.g. "Trend" (3)
• A field your chart is referring to. E.g. "Trend Segment" (4)
  • Note that if configured, you may also select table structure fields or milestone fields (this will be indicated on hovering the chart in the dashboard)
• If you need to explain a bit more, about what your Chart is about, you can use the Tooltip field. (5)
• If you want to include Elements that have no Value added for the specified field, check the box next to "Show N/A" (6)
• If you have configured color options for the respective field option via the Field Configuration, you can choose whether the configured colors or the ITONICS standard color schema shall be displayed on the Dashboard (7).

After you've selected your Element Type, a filter section appears on the top. This filter section is similar to the one you can find everywhere else in the system. You can use it to further narrow down the results shown in your chart. E.g. "Market Potential Rating High - Very High "to only show trends based on their segmentation which has a high market potential rating. Note: the filter selected here will be active for the respective chart in the dashboard and indicated within the hoverable tooltip on the chart under “Chart Filters”.

Note: for the line chart type only, there is an optional Average aggregation option available that may be used if the underlying segmentation field of the line chart is a table structure field with row/column aggregation enabled. If enabled, instead of the default SUM aggregation, an AVG aggregation will be applied for the calculation of the values in the line chart. Be aware that the average aggregation option must be activated by ITONICS first.

If you are satisfied with your chart configuration, click the Save button in the bottom right corner. You can always come back and edit your changes later by clicking on the Edit button on the Chart Configuration page.

After you have finished the previous steps, you can add the created Chart to a Dashboard by using the Dashboard View Configuration.

Creating dashboard pages and adding charts

To add your own dashboards, go to the Settings Wheel > System Administration > Dashboard Configuration.  Click on the tab Dashboard View Configuration. Here you can see the Dashboard View Configuration of your Dashboard pages. The first tab system statistics is a static one, you can not place custom charts there. 

Via the button Add Tab, you can add your own dashboard page. A popup appears where you are asked to add a Title and configure which Users/Groups/Roles have access to this dashboard.

After you have created your own Dashboard Page, you can go there by clicking on it.

Now you are presented with an empty section where you can place your charts. The interface will show you options on how you can place your charts. Some chart types can be placed next to each other while others need a whole row. 

After clicking Save, you can now find your newly created dashboard in the main navigation.

Within the dashboard, you can use the global filter section to apply global filters across all charts. To activate the global filter section for a respective dashboard, when configuring the tab/dashboard via the Dashboard Configuration, check the Show filters on Dashboard tab option.

On the global filter section, you can choose a general filter to apply for all charts, e.g., only filtering for elements with Status: Published or narrowing down all charts for elements fitting a specific date range. Furthermore, you can also select additional entity type-specific filters (Note: only the filter sections for the entity types used within the charts are visible). These will then apply to the charts sharing the same underlying entity type, e.g., having multiple charts of type “Innovation Project” configured, and then applying an additional global, entity type-specific filter “Status: Critical” to filter down all Innovation Project charts for the critical Project elements, only. 

Thereby, all filters activate across the dashboard are indicated via the Active Filters section, while the exact filters active for each chart are indicated via the chart-specific hoverable tooltip, differentiating between the filters defined within the chart configuration and the filters chosen globally. 

Also, note that you can unselect filters via the “X” icon from the active filters section (besides the “Entity Type filters”), but, be aware that this might impact multiple charts. However, you can always use the “Reset Filters” button allowing you to reset the globally selected filters on the dashboard, which will set back the charts to the originally chosen chart filters, unselecting the globally applied filters.

Note: All active filters on an entity filter section (e.g., all Innovation Project filters) and the general filters section are combined to create a chart. Now, one known limitation is that this causes chart-specific filters from other charts belonging to the same entity type to appear in the Global filters section of a chart’s tooltip, even though you did not alter the value of that particular filer’s input field. However, ITONICS aims to rework the underlying filter logic to improve on this limitation.