Introduction

This post describes how to create a simple multi-stream interactive ‘what’s coming up’ dashboard. The dashboard represents a form of calendar which displays what events are coming up for a particular team.

The Dashboard

The following screenshots are of the completed dashboard. The dashboard displays several ‘what’s coming up’ records using the ‘what’s coming up’ entities card form. (The card design is described further down in this post).

The filters

Show Visual Filter

Clicking on the ‘Show Visual Filter’ button displays the custom defined visual filter. Clicking on each section of the pie chart displays a filtered view of the records in the ‘What’s Coming Up – Team A’ view.

Show Global Filter

Clicking on the ‘Global Filter’ button allows the ‘What’s Coming Up – Team A’ to be filtered by the ‘What’s Coming Up’ entity’s custom attribute ‘Importance’. This attribute has ‘Appears in global filter in interactive experience’ selected (as shown in Figure 4.)

Summary of the Development steps

The following steps describe, at a very high level, the steps that were taken to produce the dashboard displayed above.

Development of the entity

To represent the events coming up for Team A, an entity called ‘new_whatscomingup’ was created.

Note: one interesting custom attribute of this entity is displayed below in Figure 4. It’s presented on the dashboard in various colours, depending on it’s value. As mentioned above, it appears in the global filter as well.

Since we are defining a type of calendar, it would seem logical to define this entity as an activity entity but it was decided not to for reasons that are stated at the end of this post.

Development of the card

Update the ‘Card’ form type for the entity as shown in Figure 5. (Please be aware that the amount of fields on the form is limited. For example, there can only be one ColorStrip defined.)

Develop the dashboard

Please note that the ‘Filter By’ attribute was set to the What’s Coming Up entity’s custom attribute ‘Date’. This is what’s used by the filter highlighted in green below

Define the entity as an activity entity?

When defining the ‘What’s Coming Up’ entity, it was discussed whether to set it as an activity entity. Doing so would have given some advantages such as

• Being able to associate multiple activity parties to the activity. For example, listing the meeting attendees for a certain what’s coming up event

• Being able to mark the activity as complete

• Being able to place the what’s coming up activities on a particular entity’s timeline

However the above benefits were considered unnecessary. Also, one disadvantage was that for a particular security role, it would share the security privileges with all other activities. For example, the ‘Task’ activity might require the read to be at the business unit level. This would mean that the ‘What’s Coming Up’ activity would also be exposed at this level.