Dashboards

Now that we know about Configure Model-driven Charts, let’s unpack Customising the User Experience and Integrating with Model-Driven Apps.

In this video, we will look at Dashboards. A dashboard is used to show several areas of Dynamics 365 in a single display. This is useful to show an overview of the status of a process, amount of activity, and items that require attention.

Interactive Streams and Tiles

Interactive experience dashboards can be a one-stop workplace for app users, such as service reps, to see workload information and take action. They’re fully configurable, security-role based and deliver workload information across multiple streams in real-time. Interactive dashboard users don’t need to page through the application looking for a particular record – they can act on it directly from the dashboard.

The interactive experience dashboards come in two forms: multi-stream and single-stream. A stream can be summarised as a real-time view of entity data. They are based on an entity’s view or queue and as such a stream can only be based on one entity. In addition, multi-stream dashboards can be home page or entity-specific dashboards. The entity-specific dashboards are configured in a different part of the user interface and partially preloaded with the entity-specific configuration information.

Multi-Stream Dashboards

Multi-stream dashboards display data in real-time over multiple streams. Each stream can be based on a different entity, making them good for high-level overviews such as the Tier 1 Dashboard in the Customer Service hub.

To configure a multi-stream dashboard, you can choose from four different layouts:

The top tiles contain interactive charts that are referred to as Visual Filters. These charts display counts of relevant records and you can filter data contained within the dashboard by selecting different values contained within the charts.

Multi-stream dashboards also provide a Tile view which can be activated by selecting the Switch to Tile View button. This option toggles stream data into being displayed as interactive summary tiles that display the count of records within each stream.

Single-Stream Dashboards

Single-stream dashboards display data in real-time over a single stream. They enable a more detailed view of a given entity, and as such are good for monitoring fewer but more complex data, as represented in the Tier 2 Dashboard of the Customer Service Hub.

For single-stream dashboards, you can choose from four different layouts:

Interactive Tiles

Interactive tiles are useful for providing more detailed visual insights about your data. Using interactive tiles, you can:

• Show aggregated view of data across queues/views
• Select tile to drill to underlying records

Interactive tiles provide an aggregated view of the information in the streams, across queues or views that interest you most. They help you monitor the volume of cases and quickly drill down to a particular record. In a multi-stream dashboard, you can switch from the standard view to the tile view by selecting Switch to Tile View button given in the command bar.

The content of each tile represents the count of the number of records within that given stream. Hovering over the “View” text will show you from which view the tile’s stream is being pulled. Selecting a tile will produce a flyout of the records contained in the stream, which you are able to navigate to by selecting a given record.

Configuring Interactive Dashboard Fields

Any entity supported in Unified Interface can be enabled for interactive experience dashboards.

A supported field can be enabled for the interactive dashboard experience on its field settings:

Global Filter Fields can be configured by setting the “Appears in global filter in interactive experience” flag in a given field. This will cause the field to appear in the global filter flyout window:

Sortable fields can be configured by setting the “Sortable in interactive experience dashboard” flag on a field. This will cause the field to appear in the flyout that appears when a user selects the “More” on the stream header.

To compose a custom interactive dashboard, the following attributes must be set:

• Filter Entity: The visual filters and global filter attributes are based on this entity.
• Entity View: The visual filters are based on this view.
• Filter By: The field that the time frame filter applies to.
• Time Frame: The default time frame filter value for the Filter By field.

Leverage the Add Component option to add interactive charts to your dashboard:

The Add Stream option is used to add interactive streams to your dashboard:

The interactive dashboards are solution aware and can be exported and then imported into a different environment as part of a solution. However, the queues that the streams and tiles are based on aren’t solution aware. Before importing the dashboard solution into the target system, the queues have to be manually created in the target system. If you create them in the target system with the same ID, no further editing is required. This would require the use of a data import tool that can create records with the same ID, or a developer using the platform API. If those are not available, you can create them manually in Settings > Service Management > Queues. After you create the queues and import the dashboard solution to the target system, you will need to edit the streams or tiles that are based on the queues to assign the newly created queues appropriately.

Next, we look at Signals.