BI Dashboard Integration With Library

By Emma Swartz

WebFOCUS BI Dashboard is a fully customizable thin-client interface to Managed Reporting that allows users to view reports and graphs. The customization can include immediate execution of reports and graphs when the Dashboard is accessed.

Up-to-the-minute information is great but what if you don't need to re-execute the report for each invocation of Dashboard? Instead of running the report in Dashboard, a recent version of it can be retrieved from the Library and displayed. If this sounds complicated, don't worry: Dashboard in Release 7.1 has been enhanced to make retrieval and display of Library content a lot easier.

An additional tab has been added to the Content personalization screen that allows you to add reports stored in the Library to the Dashboard page (Screen 1).

Reports stored in the Library can be added to a launch, list or output block. When added to a launch or output block, the report output will appear in the content page, giving you immediate access to the report contents.

In a list block, a link to the Library output will be shown. When you click on the link the Library output will be retrieved and displayed. If more than one version of a report is stored in the Library, the newest version will always be accessed by Dashboard. So if a report is run every evening at midnight and output is placed in the Library, you will have access to the new version of the report when you open your Dashboard page in the morning.

So what does Library output look like in the Dashboard? Like any other report output. When viewing Library output added to a Dashboard Content block, you will not notice a difference between the report output retrieved from the Library and reports executed by the Dashboard.

In addition to placing output right in the Dashboard page, you can browse through the output available to you in the Library. The Library end user interface gives you access to navigate through saved reports and see various versions of report output. The Library interface can be accessed from the Tools Banner link in Dashboard and also from the Dashboard Content area.