Dashboards are highly customized, interactive reports designed to make data more accessible and visually meaningful for members of your organization. These dashboards can be built either by a Smartabase consultant, or by people in your organization who have permission to set them up. Dashboards can be designed for different types of Smartabase users, including coaches, athletes and anyone else who interacts with Smartabase. They can display data from any number of event forms that exist in the site to give people quick and easy access to all of the most relevant information to them.
If you have access to any dashboards, you'll be able to locate them under the Dashboards tool from your home screen. This may be accessible in the navigation bar and/or as a button on your front page. You may also be able to view dashboards on your Smartabase home page, depending on what permissions and settings are assigned to your account.
Your site may also display some older D3 (data driven documents) dashboards developed by Smartabase's development team. D3 dashboards are unique reports, dependent on very specific datasets and are not a tool that can be modified by Smartabase users (or builders).
This article contains information about:
Interacting with a dashboard
Once you’ve opened a dashboard, there are several ways you can interact with it. These interactive features will enable you to narrow down the data you’re looking at, as well as find further information than what’s visible on the dashboard itself.
Canvases
A dashboard can contain one or more canvases, which act like different pages. If more than one canvas is available, you will be able to navigate between them by clicking on the headings at the top of the dashboard.
This example dashboard consists of two canvases: GROUP OVERVIEW and INDIVIDUAL SUMMARY. The GROUP OVERVIEW canvas is currently being shown.
Sections
Sections are used to separate the information within a canvas. A section can be collapsed or expanded by clicking on its header bar, which can be useful when viewing a dashboard with several sections.
In the screenshots above, the FILTERS section has been expanded and collapsed to show or hide the filter widgets.
Filter widgets
Most dashboards will have one or more filters included, normally at the top of a canvas or section. Filters can be used to specify exactly which data is displayed on the dashboard, related to the date or details of the records available. There are two types of filter widgets:
- Date picker filters allow you to select dates, often set up in pairs allowing you to choose a start and end date (or date range) for your dashboard.
- Select box filters are used to group data with a similar result for specific fields. You may be able to filter the dashboard by an athlete, sport, year, season round, status or any other field.
In the example above, the Athlete widget is a select box filter and the Start Date and End Date widgets are date picker filters. The dashboard has been configured such that when you change the selected athlete and date range, the data shown in the widgets within the Individual Summary section is adjusted to meet these parameters.
Data widgets
Several types of widgets can be used to display data in a dashboard. These include tiles, tables and several types of charts, and each widget will be set up to visualize data in the most appropriate way to communicate the necessary information. When hovering over a data series on a chart widget, you may be able to see a tooltip. Some charts may also have a zoom and/or sub chart feature, which allow you to zero in on a smaller portion of the whole data set.
The dashboard in the example above consists of a table to show each person's most recent availability status and wellbeing scores, and a chart to show the wellbeing scores for each individual in a more visual format. Hovering over the bar in the chart shows the individual scores for each metric.
Record cards
If enabled, clicking on a widget will bring up additional information about its source data. If data from multiple records is populating that widget, you will first see a list of all of those records, from which you can choose an individual record to display its record card.
Record click-through
From a record card, you may also be able to click through to the record itself. This can be a valuable tool for getting more context on top of what’s available in the dashboard. If you click through to a record, saving will return you to the dashboard, which will display updated information based on any changes you made in the record.
Dashboard management options
In the top right-hand corner of all dashboards, you will find buttons to:
Printing the dashboard
When printing the dashboard, you can choose the orientation, paper size and whether you want to print all canvases or just the one you’re currently viewing. These default options can be configured when the dashboard is created.
You can then choose further settings in your browser’s print dialog box. Key browser settings can include whether you want to print or create a PDF copy, as well as enabling background graphics for the printout, which will ensure all colors used on the dashboard are the same as the printout.
You can also print the dashboard by using the print command from your keyboard.
Reloading the dashboard
Use the refresh button to reload the dashboard. This will only refresh the dashboard frame, so is much quicker and easier than refreshing the entire site. When you refresh, any changes or new data added since the initial load will be reflected in the dashboard.
View information about the dashboard
Here you can view a list of all the data sources (or event forms) that are being referenced in the dashboard. If the creator has added a general description of the dashboard, you will also see it here. At the bottom of the pop-up, you will see the version number for the Dashboard builder and the Dashboard ID.
Data sources will have one of four statuses:
- Getting data: data is being loaded from the data source. The amount of data currently loaded and the total amount of data loaded are shown.
- Loaded: data has been loaded and is available to view in the dashboard.
- No data: you do not have access to the event form associated with the data source. A warning message will also be shown in the pop-up.
- Pending: the data source is not currently being used in any widgets within the dashboard.
Caching a dashboard
If a dashboard references a large number of data sources or records and is taking longer than 20 seconds to load, a pop-up notification will ask if you want to cache the dashboard. Caching a dashboard can significantly improve load times but the data will no longer be live; instead, it will display the state of the data at the time the dashboard was cached. Caching a dashboard will also cache it for other professional users who load the dashboard for the same group.
Data is refreshed overnight or it can be refreshed manually by selecting Update cached data above the dashboard. If a cached dashboard is not viewed for more than seven days, the system will stop automatically updating the cache overnight but the configuration will still be saved. The next time the dashboard is loaded, it will update all data.
You can also manually turn off caching by selecting the information icon in the top right corner of the dashboard and unchecking the box next to Cache this dashboard. This will turn off the cache for everyone with access to this dashboard. Note that this check box will only appear if the dashboard has previously taken more than 20 seconds to load or it has been previously cached.
