The best analogy to a Tab Set would be the tabs that you see in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Before the advent of tabs, we would have multiple windows of Internet Explorer open, which was very cumbersome. With tabs we can flip through the different pages that we have opened very easily. With the Tab Set container, we can separate different pages within the dashboard. This allows us to flip through pages that are independent of each other but related to the same topic, without having to reload separate dashboards or set dynamic visibility for each page.
- Select the Tab Set container from the Containers tab.
- In the Properties window of the canvas, you can rename the tab. In our example we named the first tab as
Sales. - To add a new tab, press the + button on the top left-hand side of the canvas. It will then pop up a window that lets you name your tab. In our example, we named the second tab
Trend Analysis, as shown in the following screenshot:
- Each tab is separated into a different canvas in the Object Browser window. All components residing in each canvas will show up as child objects of the canvas.
The Tab Set container is basically a set of Canvas Containers that hold your objects. The set of Canvas Containers is distinguished by the tab at the top of the main container. Users can switch through tabs at runtime very easily. This functionality emulates the tabs found on popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
When building Tab Set containers, designers should be wary of having too many tabs or too many levels of tab hierarchies. It is recommended to keep the number of tabs in each level to a maximum of five.
Take the following image for example. With nine tabs, we can see that the dashboard starts to become overwhelming and complex. It is also good to keep the number of hierarchies to a maximum of two. Again, we can see that once we get past two hierarchies, it starts to become messy and users will have too many paths to choose from.
Finally, each additional tab means an additional page. With each additional page comes a set of components and charts, which equate to a larger footprint. Dashboards with a larger footprint will take longer to load due to the size of the SWF file and performance will take a hit due to the number of objects.