This framework provides a standardized way to implement and publish dashboards to the Pentaho BI Platform. The Pentaho AJAX API is used to retrieve the BI content and the Pentaho Solution Repository stores the content definitions. Therefore all dashboard information objects, such as charts and reports, need to be defined in Pentaho Action Sequences.
These files are at the heart of this dashboard framework.
- Dashboards.jsp - JSP file that provides the access point to the
- template-dashboard.html - A template organizing the navigation and content area
- dashboard-list.xsl - Style sheet to display the dashboard navigation bar - Not used in versions >=2.1-RC1
- dashboard library - a collection of JavaScript files
Here's a simplified diagram of the CDF Architecture:
The Dashboards.jsp page (/pentaho/Dashboards) is called by the user and provides the access to all Dashboards.
As common within the Pentaho Solutions, this framework works on a set of assumptions concerning the organization and naming of the folder structure and files. A new Pentaho Solution called dashboards is the root of all dashboards. : Each dashboard is defined in a separate folder that is a direct child of the dashboards folder and must contain two files, index.xml and template.html.The index.xml is used to identify the dashboard's name and description just as in any other folder in the Pentaho solution repository. The template.html file determines the dashboard's design.
The content layout as well as the static content are defined with regular HTML. Any kind of component can be used as a placeholder, being <div> and <span>-"div" and "span" tags the most commonly used. These information objects are defined as dashboard components.
When the user calls up a dashboard, one or multiple components will be executed from the dashboard library. Some of them will result in the executions of Action Sequences on the BI Platform. The platform returns the results and the dashboard library will send the content to be displayed in the specified tag back to the browser.