In these days, having a tool for end users to create their own dashboards with key business indicators using a highly graphical and intuitive visual interface is of huge value towards improving performance in organizations.
Pentaho Dashboard Designer is a plugin that is available only in Pentaho EE. It allows users to easily create their own dashboards. In this recipe guide, you will be able to create a quick and simple dashboard using the Foodmart database storage in MongoDB.
To get ready for this recipe, you will need the Pentaho BI server running, and make sure you have the MongoDB server running with the data from the first recipe of this chapter.
Perform the following steps to create a dashboard:
- On the Home screen, click on the Create New button and then on the Dashboard button, as you can see in this screenshot:
- In the Templates section at the bottom, choose the 1 over 1 option.
- Under Properties, enter the page title as Dashboard Sample.
- In the first panel, click on the insert content dropdown and choose the File option, as you can see here:
- In the Select popup, select the
California profitanalysis view file saved in the previous recipe. - Set the Title field of the panel as California profit.
- In the second panel, import another file. In this case, it is the Orders Report file created in the previous chapter.
- Set the Title field of the second panel as Orders. You should get a configuration similar to what is shown in this screenshot:
- Save the dashboard by clicking on the Save button in the top bar. In the Save popup, enter
Dashboard Samplein the Filename field. Save the dashboard in the same folder as of the previous view and click on Save. - Now let's open the dashboard in view mode. From the Home dropdown, select Browse Files and navigate to the repository until you find the dashboard saved earlier. Double-click on the file to open it, and you should see the dashboard as shown in the following screenshot:
This recipe shows you how to create a quick dashboard using an Analyzer view and a Pentaho report created in the previous chapter in two panels. Like Pentaho Analyzer, Pentaho Dashboard Designer is an intuitive plugin for creating your own dashboards quickly, and like Analyzer, Pentaho Dashboard Designer also sends direct MongoDB queries on the fly to the MongoDB cluster. Furthermore, Pentaho Dashboard Designer supports multi-visualization source types such as Pentaho Analyzer, charts, tables, reports, websites, and so on.
There are some more features available on Pentaho Dashboard Designer, such as drill-down and parameters, that help you explore data in the same dashboard.