Embed Ad-Hoc

This applies to: Managed Dashboards, Managed Reports

Embed a simplified, self-serve dashboard creation experience directly onto your own application's page by calling the createAdhocDashboard method. This enables your application's users to create and customize their own ad hoc dashboards and visualizations using a subset of features of the full design experience to ensure all types of users can instantly take advantage of its capabilities.

Note: Ad hoc dashboards include the ability to customize metric sets. Users must have a power user seat license or higher to perform this customization.

See the method's arguments for options you can pass for various customizations, plus the same sessionId and embeddedViewServiceName options as described inEmbed Ad-Hoc. The following example passes the session ID as a shortcut to first calling setSessionId, and otherwise uses default options:

By default, the blank ad hoc dashboard editor opens and allows users to choose an existing ad hoc dashboard to open, or to click in the toolbar to add existing data or other content to create a new one. These are saved in and opened from the project specified by the defaultProjectId option, or the user's "my project" if not specified.

Create and Edit an Ad Hoc Dashboard

From the blank editor, clicking on a toolbar button adds content to a new ad hoc dashboard. Users can click the first button to add data via a metric set, choosing from a list of all metric sets made available to the logged-in user according to their set file security privileges.

Added content is always positioned automatically to fill all available space and dynamically resize itself, with a built-in title that users can click to change.

The menu icon in the top-right corner of each content item provides options such as Delete to remove it from the dashboard, or Re-Visualize for switching between Symphony's visualization types while displaying the same data. Users can also right-click or long-tap directly on data to access the metric set's contextual options such as drill down, filtering, and more.

Metric sets are added to ad hoc dashboards as a copy so that users can make any desired changes to the data displayed, via the Data Analysis panel on the right. This is based on the full Data Analysis Panel provided for metric sets, allowing data to be added and removed, grouped, sorted, filtered, and more. Clicking on Visualization in this panel allows for changing the way data is visualized, such as by changing color for different values or displaying data in labels and tooltips.

The panels on the right can be switched between like tabs, or clicked to expand or collapse them. The Properties panel provides a simplified subset of the property options provided when logging into Symphony directly, for styling and other customizations. For quicker access to specific parts of a visualization, users can right-click or long-tap them directly and choose a properties option such as Series Properties for a chart's data point series or Column Properties in a table.

After adding multiple metric sets or other content items, the ad hoc dashboard's layout adjusts automatically to accommodate them but the user can adjust the sizing of rows and columns by clicking on the Grid icon in the toolbar. Users can click on a visualization to switch to it from another one when using the Properties or Data Analysis panels.

Existing full-featured dashboards and reports that were created directly in Symphony can be added from the toolbar the same way as metric sets, and their data can be interacted with, but settings and styling can't be changed.

Save and Publish an Ad Hoc Dashboard

Ad hoc dashboards are not saved automatically, instead users can click the Save button in the toolbar to choose a name and location within the project specified by the defaultProjectId option. If no project ID was specified, ad hoc dashboards will be saved and opened from each user's personal project or "My Project".

Once saved, users can click to Publish the dashboard using the next toolbar button to allow others with access to the same project to view the changes. Users can publish the same dashboard again to save and share any changes made after that. This is like the check in option in the full Symphony application including saving the revision history. By default, only the user that created it is assigned file security privileges for modifying it, but other users can view it or save a copy, or the file privileges can be changed.

Note: Users can't access other user's personal projects by default, so set a project ID if you intend for different users to be able to access each other's published dashboards.

Using the Share button in the toolbar, users can share the ad hoc dashboard as an exported file such as an image, PDF, or Excel. The Notification button sets up a notification or alert to export and deliver content via email to selected users/addresses or via other enabled delivery providers.

Ad hoc dashboards are saved in the applicable project like a regular dashboard file, and can be accessed and managed by users logged into the full Symphony application with sufficient access rights or as an administrator. While they cannot be created or edited directly in this mode, they can be opened for viewing, and you can use the Save As option in the toolbar to convert it to a full dashboard to edit it.