JDashboard is a new way of information delivery, using a user portal user interface rather than a web report or page report. Users can create, edit and browse dashboards from the JReport Console using JDashboard. Library components are the basic members in dashboards for presenting data via intuitive components such as charts, crosstabs, tables, and geographic maps. Library components are created using JReport Designer (for details, see Library Components in the JReport Designer User's Guide), and then published to the component library on JReport Server for use when creating or modifying dashboards. With pre-built library components, users can freely choose the objects they want to display in the dashboard, without having to know how these objects were created, what data sources to use, what styles to set, etc. A dashboard can hold multiple library components so that when browsing the dashboard users are able to see multiple data aspects. Within a dashboard, library components are able to communicate with each other via the message mechanism. This allows actions such as common filters to be applied to all the components of a dashboard even when coming from different data sources.
Since predefined containers are used for holding objects, it is easy to move objects around and resize them in dashboards.
This chapter covers the following topics:
Notes: