Auto-sizing dashboards
To create dashboards which remain usable and attractive on a variety of screen sizes and resolutions requires design decisions in both Infor BI Dashboards and Infor BI Application Studio.
In summary, these are the steps required to create dashboards which resize automatically:
- Auto-sizing
- In Infor BI Dashboards and Infor BI Dashboards the property of each dashboard is enabled by default. But this alone does not ensure that a dashboard will remain usable and attractive on different screen sizes. The reports need to be able to shrink to a specified minimum size, and the widgets in which they are displayed must automatically fill the space available to them.
- Shrinkage and growth
- Create Application Studio reports in which one or more columns and rows can grow or shrink. You can allow shrinkage and growth on multiple columns and rows as required. For example, you might enable growth and shrinkage only on the columns and rows containing a chart. But to enable report resizing, growth or shrinkage need be enabled on only one column or row.
- Which columns and rows you allow to grow and shrink, and by how much, depends on their content, and on testing the reports in a variety of screen sizes. The minimum width of a column should be wide enough to display its content in full.
- Report size
- Allowing reports to shrink and grow is not sufficient to ensure that they remain usable. To ensure that widgets, and the reports they contain, do not become too small, specify a minimum report size. The correct minimum size can only be determined by testing the report to find the smallest size at which it remains usable, and attractive.
- You cannot specify maximum report dimensions in Application Studio. This is because it would result in empty spaces between widgets if, for example, a dashboard were displayed on a bigger screen than for which it was designed.
- Horizontal and vertical fill in widgets
- In Infor BI Dashboards and Infor BI Dashboards on iPad, you can specify that widgets automatically expand horizontally or vertically to fill the space available to them. If you have created a dashboard, with widgets containing reports that can shrink and grow, and which have a minimum size; specify the fill characteristics of the widgets. In many cases, you will specify both horizontal and vertical fill. But, in some widgets, you might specify only vertical or only horizontal fill. For example, if the content of a report is primarily horizontal - such as line chart, or a sparkline - you might specify only horizontal fill.