Understanding Digital Dashboards for Developers

A digital dashboard is a workspace that provides access to many common functions within Aptify. In many cases, a user can perform all of his or her common day-to-day tasks directly from one or more dashboards without having to access the Folder List or individual views.
A dashboard typically contains one or more of the following elements:

• Buttons that perform specific actions, such as running a wizard, when clicked.
• Views that display records of interest to the user. A dashboard can contain any type of view, including Charts, Calendars, and Pivot Tables.
• A list of Most Recently Used records.

• Information from the user's Microsoft Outlook account, including e-mails and Calendar items.

  Aptify's integration with Microsoft Outlook requires Microsoft Office 2007 or later.

  
  
  

• A Web browser window.
• Application-specific components, such as the Object Repository dashboard.

Each Aptify Application has one or more associated dashboards. In addition, the system provides a main dashboard that appears each time a user opens the Aptify client application and each time a user selects the My Aptify Applications heading in the Folder List.

Digital Dashboards are made up of Dashboard Areas, each of which contains one or more Dashboard Parts. Basic properties may be set at the dashboard level, such as background color and borders. The dashboard areas are the sections displayed on a dashboard, while the dashboard parts define the specific items that are included in each dashboard area. Each part is an implementation of a specific Dashboard Component, just like Process Flow Steps may implement Process Components, and Form Template Parts implement Form Components.

See Using Digital Dashboards for detailed information on how to create and use dashboards. Also, see Administering Dashboards for information on how to configure a dashboard so it is available to all users (Global scope) or to a specific set of users (Group scope).

See About the Sample Application Dashboards for information on the sample dashboards included with the Motor Loaner system.

Also, when writing a SQL statement to populate a view in a dashboard part (as opposed to linking to a Views record), note that the number of characters in the SQL statement cannot exceed 255. See Manager's Dashboard for an example of how Aptify recommends a developer work around this limitation by adding a Database Object that performs the function to limit the number of characters required in the SQL statement.