Dashboards and other new features

There is zero documentation about the dashboard feature on the wiki.
Can someone summarize what it does? How would I add custom queries to
be run?

And in the same vein, how can I create a custom component(?) which
would be available for displaying on the At A Glance screen?

I’ve been very excited digging around the new features, but sometimes
I’m still a bit bewildered about how to configure somethings
(dashboards being one). Will the wiki be updated once 3.8 goes gold?
And for the record, I clarified the page on CustomFields this week so
I’m willing to eat my own dog food. :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Drew
Drew Taylor * Web development & consulting
Email: drew@drewtaylor.com * Site implementation & hosting
Web : www.drewtaylor.com * perl/mod_perl/DBI/mysql/postgres

A dashboard is a collection of saved searches that are run on a schedule you
define and emailed to you.On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 8:20 AM, Drew Taylor taylor.andrew.j@gmail.com wrote:

There is zero documentation about the dashboard feature on the wiki.
Can someone summarize what it does? How would I add custom queries to
be run?

And in the same vein, how can I create a custom component(?) which
would be available for displaying on the At A Glance screen?

I’ve been very excited digging around the new features, but sometimes
I’m still a bit bewildered about how to configure somethings
(dashboards being one). Will the wiki be updated once 3.8 goes gold?
And for the record, I clarified the page on CustomFields this week so
I’m willing to eat my own dog food. :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Drew


Drew Taylor * Web development & consulting
Email: drew@drewtaylor.com * Site implementation & hosting
Web : www.drewtaylor.com * perl/mod_perl/DBI/mysql/postgres


List info:
The rt-devel Archives

Hi Drew,

There is zero documentation about the dashboard feature on the wiki.
Can someone summarize what it does? How would I add custom queries to
be run?

Since I added the feature, I’ll happily braindump what dashboards are.

Todd’s one-line summary is exactly right. A dashboard is a named, shared
collection of saved searches that RT can email you whenever you want.

You can create, modify, and subscribe to dashboards by going to
Preferences then Dashboards.

A dashboard can be shared between a group and the entire system. For
example, in RT’s own RT, we have a dashboard for the 3.8 release, shared
across the RT Hackers group. This dashboard displays each upcoming RT
release ticket, tickets that are blocking the 3.8.0 release, and some
other useful searches.

There’s also a dashboard portlet that shows you each dashboard so no
dashboard is more than a click away. Even better is that you can just
bookmark the link to the dashboard and have that be your new home page.

In a version beyond 3.8.0 (probably 3.8.1 but I haven’t coded it yet so
I can’t say for sure), dashboards will contain any portlet, not just searches.
Ideally “RT at a Glance” will end up being just a dashboard, since
there’s a fair amount of code and concept duplication.

And in the same vein, how can I create a custom component(?) which
would be available for displaying on the At A Glance screen?

It’s just two steps. First, create a template in /Elements/Foo. Then add
Foo to the @HomepageComponents variable in your RT_SiteConfig.pm.

I’ve been very excited digging around the new features, but sometimes
I’m still a bit bewildered about how to configure somethings
(dashboards being one). Will the wiki be updated once 3.8 goes gold?
And for the record, I clarified the page on CustomFields this week so
I’m willing to eat my own dog food. :slight_smile:

People are very much encouraged to try out the 3.8 release candidates
and update the wiki. Feel free to ask questions on the mailing list,
I’ll be more than happy to answer anything about dashboards. It’s a cool
feature and I hope people enjoy it.

I’m currently focusing on making dashboards shinier and shinier, so
documentation may lag behind. :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Drew

Hope this helps,
Shawn

wiki is for community and managed by community. As long as RT users
don’t care to update wiki it will be out of date.On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Drew Taylor taylor.andrew.j@gmail.com wrote:

There is zero documentation about the dashboard feature on the wiki.
Can someone summarize what it does? How would I add custom queries to
be run?

And in the same vein, how can I create a custom component(?) which
would be available for displaying on the At A Glance screen?

I’ve been very excited digging around the new features, but sometimes
I’m still a bit bewildered about how to configure somethings
(dashboards being one). Will the wiki be updated once 3.8 goes gold?
And for the record, I clarified the page on CustomFields this week so
I’m willing to eat my own dog food. :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Drew


Drew Taylor * Web development & consulting
Email: drew@drewtaylor.com * Site implementation & hosting
Web : www.drewtaylor.com * perl/mod_perl/DBI/mysql/postgres


List info: The rt-devel Archives

Best regards, Ruslan.

Hi Shawn-

Todd’s one-line summary is exactly right. A dashboard is a named,
shared
collection of saved searches that RT can email you whenever you want.

Can I ask you a naive question? Why do you call them dashboards?

I originally called them “email reports”, which is too generic to be
interesting. Someone else came up with the name dashboard and we agreed
that it wasn’t entirely wrong.

As described they don’t sound much like any of the dashboards people
generally interact with (when was the last time your car sent you mail
as a way of interacting with it?). I understand one could construct
one’s own personal heads-up display (which is more like a dashboard),
but the timed emailing of the data is where the analogue seems to
break down hard.

The emailing part is secondary. I really like that you can bookmark a
dashboard and get a customized display with only a few clicks. Sure the
analogy isn’t perfect but I think it’s good enough. :slight_smile:

I’m just wondering if this nomenclature will get in the way of people
understanding and appreciating just how cool they are.

Now that there’s a Dashboards portlet I hope people will try them so
they can be more productive.

  -- dNb

Shawn

The emailing part is secondary. I really like that you can bookmark a
dashboard and get a customized display with only a few clicks. Sure
the
analogy isn’t perfect but I think it’s good enough. :slight_smile:

Ok, cool. Thanks for the response.
– dNb

Oops. Should have gone to list too.---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Drew Taylor taylor.andrew.j@gmail.com
Date: Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 10:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Rt-devel] Dashboards and other new features
To: Shawn M Moore sartak@bestpractical.com

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 6:21 PM, Shawn M Moore sartak@bestpractical.com wrote:

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 01:20:23PM +0100, Drew Taylor wrote:

Since I added the feature, I’ll happily braindump what dashboards are.

Todd’s one-line summary is exactly right. A dashboard is a named, shared
collection of saved searches that RT can email you whenever you want.

You can create, modify, and subscribe to dashboards by going to
Preferences then Dashboards.

A dashboard can be shared between a group and the entire system. For
example, in RT’s own RT, we have a dashboard for the 3.8 release, shared
across the RT Hackers group. This dashboard displays each upcoming RT
release ticket, tickets that are blocking the 3.8.0 release, and some
other useful searches.

There’s also a dashboard portlet that shows you each dashboard so no
dashboard is more than a click away. Even better is that you can just
bookmark the link to the dashboard and have that be your new home page.

In a version beyond 3.8.0 (probably 3.8.1 but I haven’t coded it yet so
I can’t say for sure), dashboards will contain any portlet, not just searches.
Ideally “RT at a Glance” will end up being just a dashboard, since
there’s a fair amount of code and concept duplication.

And the new wiki page on Dashboards is
Dashboards - Request Tracker Wiki. Patches welcome. :slight_smile:

Drew Taylor * Web development & consulting
Email: drew@drewtaylor.com * Site implementation & hosting
Web : www.drewtaylor.com * perl/mod_perl/DBI/mysql/postgres