Pretty Dashboards

One of the things that I do at work is support the Unica NetTracker and Affinium NetInsight products. In the course of my work I sometimes find nice things that it would be good to share with a wider audience.

The products have had two sorts of dashboards for some time - the pretty graphical dashboard with nothing but pictures and the informative but ugly 'Executive' dashboard with nothing but numbers.

Wouldn't it be nice to combine the two? (can you tell where I'm going with this yet?)

Disclaimer :

While I have tested this myself in a few different environments and it all seems okay neither I, my employer (SCL) or Unica can be held responsible for any loss or damage of you trying-out any of this. This article is written by me (Bob Mitchell) and is not produced or endorsed in any way by either my employer (SCL) or Unica.

These instructions apply to version 7.1 of NetTracker and NetInsight, I would imagine that there will be a neater, gui-driven way of doing this in future versions of the product.

1. Create a graphical dashboard containing the graphical elements that you want. Save it as a custom report.

2. Take a look at the reportxxx.xml file (where xxx is the number of the report) in inst_dir/data/profilename.

3. Now take a look at the file 'execdash.xml' (It's for the Executive Dashboard - the one with all the numbers). Look familiar? (You should notice that the 'section' is of type 'executive', but otherwise it looks a bit like the graphical dashboard.

4. Transplant a section from execdash.xml into your reportxxx.xml

5. Force NetTracker to regenerate the report - perhaps just click on a single day and it will regenerate the report from scratch.

6. Observe the results :

Now, I think you'll agree that this both looks nice, while also presenting 'real' numbers.

Further options :

1. Change the 'link' attribute - this will alter, or prevent the report you get when you click on it to drill-down.

2. Change the 'label' attribute to rename an item