Beside the Interactive and Editable modes you can display a dashboard in Flash mode. No modification is necessary to the documents: you only need to have the Adobe Flash player installed. Flash visualization is usually slower in the loading phase (due to the size of the SWF components and XML data needed to bootstrap the dashboard), especially if the document contains a lot of data, but offers a whole set of widgets to enrich the user's experience.
Most probably the Flash player is already installed in your PC; if not, go to http://www.adobe.com/go/getflash/ and download the appropriate installer for your browser and operating system.
Create a new document based on the Blank Dashboard template:
- Add to the Dataset Objects the 28 InternetSales Dashboard report.
- From the Insert menu, go to Widgets | Flash and click on Data Cloud.
- Draw a rectangle on the top-left part of the root panel.
- You will see the same placeholders as when you create a grid: drop the Product Category on rows and the metric as data. It looks exactly as a grid.
- Now move to the right part of the dashboard and add a standard grid with the Product attribute and the metric.
- Click on the toolbar button that's right next to Interactive Mode, with a small F on the icon (tool tip: Flash Mode).
- The left widget displays a series of product subcategories with different sizes, the bigger the font the higher the sales amount. We can now set this widget as a selector so that when we pick a subcategory in the left, the right grid is filtered accordingly. Go back to the design mode.
- Right-click on the Product Subcategory header on the left grid, click on Use as Selector and run it again in Flash Mode.
- See that you can click on a subcategory and drive the right grid, cool! With Ctrl + click you can multi-select, multi-cool!
MicroStrategy creates a SWF file in the background and runs it inside the browser, see the following image:
Few widgets can work in DHTML also, please refer to the documentation: Dashboards and Widgets Creation Guide for details on the requirements and the capabilities of each object.
You can set the default visualization for a dashboard, so that the users don't have to switch between Interactive and Flash when they open the document. When in design mode, from the Tools | Document Properties menu, look for a setting labeled Run by Default as.
- The Restricting rows – compare an attribute to another attribute recipe in Chapter 8, Dynamic Selection with Filters and Prompts