Developing dashboards can be very tedious. So we wanted to provide you with a set of time-saving tips that will make your life a lot easier.
In this big How to do it… section we will cover all tips for this recipe.
When grouping components, you can either group directly from the Object Browser or you can insert a Canvas Container and then drop the objects you want grouped inside the Canvas Container.
Here are some pros and cons of both:
This is a very useful feature. For example, you may have three bar charts and want to resize all the title fonts. Instead of resizing each one individually, you can select each one by holding Ctrl and clicking on each chart from the dashboard canvas, or holding Ctrl and clicking on each chart from the Object Browser. You will now be able to edit items that are common to all the charts (such as the Appearance tab).
As mentioned in Chapter 7, Dashboard Look and Feel, creating a dashboard that is neatly aligned with charts and components of similar sizing provides a cleaner user experience. Accomplishing this can be a very tedious task when there are many objects involved. Just imagine slowly resizing, aligning, and spacing each and every object manually. Fortunately, we can resize, space, and align objects easily using some of the helpful toolbar functions as shown in the following screenshot:
For example, if you wanted to resize the following bar chart to be exactly the same as the line chart and align the top so that it is equal as well, you would do the following:
The alignment functions are great for moving components so that they are exactly aligned with one another. However, there are cases when we may want to move a particular object to an exact location. In most cases, we can drag with the mouse, but it is difficult to drag a component to the exact pixel for pinpoint accuracy.
Thus, what a user can do is first drag the component close to the exact position of choice. Then, they can use the arrow keys to slowly move the object to the exact pixel.
The Grid is a helpful mechanism to visually aid developers on the exact pixel location of components. To turn on the Grid, navigate to View | Grid.
You can also set the sizing of each Grid as well as the option to snap objects to the Grid when moving objects around. To set the Grid options, click on File | Preferences | Grid.
Templates are a great way of reusing components such as headers, footers, and color schemes over and over without having to recreate them on every dashboard. However, there are cases where certain charts, selectors, and buttons may be needed in some dashboards.
One neat feature that SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards has is the ability to have another SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards instance open, and then copy the objects from that dashboard to another dashboard currently in development. This is useful if there is formatting and cell binding that can be reused. If there were 20 reusable objects, for example, this would save us a great deal of time by copying and pasting the components instead of recreating each one.