Dashboards and reports

A full discussion of dashboards is outside the scope of this tutorial. But it is important to know about them and the things to consider when you design reports for dashboards.

Dashboards is an application in which you create dashboards containing multiple reports and web content. Dashboard content is contained in widgets which you can resize and reposition on-screen.

Application Studio has features to specify report sizes and to enable columns and rows to shrink and grow within specified limits. These help to ensure that dashboards remain usable and attractive on different screen sizes and resolutions, or if you decide to rearrange your content.

Auto-sizing is enabled by default in dashboards. To use auto-sizing, create reports which can shrink and grow. To ensure that reports remain usable, ensure that they cannot shrink too much.

A report can be resized if shrinkage or growth is specified on a single column or row. Allow shrinkage and growth on multiple columns and rows as required. For example, enable growth and shrinkage only on the columns and rows that contain a chart.

Which columns and rows you allow to grow and shrink, and by how much, depends on their content. The size of screen on which the reports are intended to be viewed is also a factor. The minimum width of a column should be wide enough to display its content in full.