About dashboards

Pivots make it easy to interactively build and edit dashboards without writing a single line of XML code.

• Add a pivot you have just created to a new or existing dashboard: You can jump right into dashboard creation after creating a pivot visualization by using the Create Dashboard Panel. It guides you through the process of creating a dashboard panel based on the search and adding it to a new or preexisting dashboard. When you finish, you are still in the Pivot view.

• Use the Dashboard Editor to create dashboards and populate them with dashboard panels: You can also use the Dashboard Editor to edit existing dashboards. This method of dashboard creation is useful if you have a set of pivot reports that you want to quickly base a set of dashboard panels upon.

Change dashboard permissions

You can specify access to a dashboard from the Dashboard Editor. However, your user role and capabilities defined for that role might limit the type of access you can define.

If your user role is admin with the default set of capabilities, then you can create dashboards that are private, visible in a specific app, or visible in all apps. You can also provide access to other user roles, such as user, admin, and other roles with specific capabilities.

For additional information on setting up permissions for dashboards and other knowledge objects refer to Manage knowledge object permissions in the Admin Manual.

Change dashboard panel visualizations

After you create a panel with the Dashboard Editor, use the Visualization Editor to change the visualization type displayed in the panel, and to determine how that visualization displays and behaves. The Visualization Editor only allows you to choose from visualization types that have their data structure requirements matched by the search that has been specified for the panel.

• For an overview of the various visualization types and their formatting/display options, see the Visualization reference topic in the Dashboards and Visualizations manual.
• For more information about the data structures required by the visualization types see Data structure requirements for visualizations in the Dashboards and Visualizations manual.

Edit the XML configuration of a dashboard

Although you are not required to use XML to build dashboards, you can edit a dashboard's panels by editing the XML configuration for the dashboard. Using XML provides access to features that are not available from the Dashboard Editor. For example, you can edit the XML configuration to change the name of dashboard or specify a custom number of rows in a table.

For more information about editing XML for dashboards created with the Dashboard Editor, see Dashboard examples in the Dashboards and Visualizations manual.