Have you ever wanted to make a dashboard learn a new trick?
For instance:
1. Add a banner and a logo to make a crucial enterprise dashboard much more prominent and identifiable.
2. Add navigation buttons to a dashboard header to expose information and/or a relevant workflow to the audience of a crucial enterprise dashboard.
3. Hide a dashboard breakdown source - those PA filters at the top of some dashboards - on certain tabs.
4. etc! Be imaginative!
For those familiar with dashboards and the tricks they know, we know that the OOTB knows no such tricks. So, it's not possible. Or is it?
Dynamic Content for Dynamic Solutions
With Dynamic Content Blocks you can add freeform code to a dashboard that can operate on the webpage. In other words, we can modify the webpage to achieve a creative purpose that lies outside of the OOTB framework. Which means that we can teach a dashboard new tricks! Importantly, we can add code that will hide our dynamic content block so that the end users won't even know they are there! I call these sort of content blocks "self-hiding dashboard utilities".
Here are screenshots of real-life examples of the first examples, shown from the end-user perspective: (notice that you can't see the utilities (dynamic content blocks) that added the header elements!)
And here is what these utilities look like when the dashboard side panel is open: (easy to moderate: visible & context provided)
What Do You Need?
I can help by sharing the code of the self-hiding frameworks I utilize for this purpose and an example of a specific utility that uses them to remain incognito while it modifies the webpage to accomplish its creative purpose.
The following three frameworks are in the attached "JRW Dashboards UI Macros v0.1 (+Drilldown Disabler).xml":
1. A custom eventbus that grants access to otherwise-unavailable dashboard events.
2. Auto-hide logic that shows and hides utility widgets based on the current state of the tab's side panel.
3. A specific utility that disables drilldowns for reports that are on its given dashboard tab.
Conclusion
Integrating with these frameworks, you can easily begin creating your own unique utilities. Each utility will have its own unique logic - depending on its end goal - but they should all be able to utilize these frameworks to remain in incognito mode while accomplishing your purpose. I hope that I've provided some fuel for your creative fire!
Kind Regards,
Joseph
