The Dashboard Spy

Dashboard designers are making more and more use of RIA (Rich Internet Application) techniques especially in the area of data graphing.

Rich Internet Applications, as you know, are web applications with the UI functionality of traditional client applications (desktop). Of course, when it comes to dashboards and business intelligence software, this has come full circle. We all remember fondly the rich features of our Visual Basic front end applications. We had combo dropdowns, type-ahead field selection and other rich UI features that we had to give up in the rush to become web-enabled. HTML just couldn’t provide the “juice” and we had to scale back our user experience expectations. Now, with the advent of RIA technology such as AJAX, FLEX, FLASH. etc., we are getting back our rich interfaces while still being web based.

Let’s take a look at a Dundas dashboard that offers such interactivity in drilling down on data. This customer service dashboard has a graph in the lower right spot that offers interesting functionality.

Let’s first take a look at the dashboard and then we’ll show you the functionality of the chart.

When you explore the lower right chart (try it at the above link), you will see that you can drag selections and have the chart repaint on the fly to show the new data range.

Here is the view with the widest data range:

To select a range, you click and drag a selection:

And here is the maximum data drill down view:

Note that you can pan left and right to move along the X axis.

Tags: Dundas Charts for Dashboards, Interactive Data Graphs