Community Dashboard Framework for Pentaho

June 20, 2008 by Kevin.Haas.

If you’ve been looking at Pentaho at all, one of the things that has been tricky in the past was the ability to create slick dashboards, without the complexity under JBoss Portal. Most people expect to be able to access single page, interactive dashboards in their BI solutions. And while Jaspersoft will certainly make a leap with Jaspersoft v3, the Pentaho community has stepped up and provided the Community Dashboard Framework wiki.pentaho.com/display/COM/Community+Dashboard+Framework.

As I understand, Ingo Klose and Pedro Alvares were instrumental in developing this, and they are to be congratulated for the awesome work. I’ve worked with the CDF for a few weeks now, and it’s a pretty impressive and easy to use framework. Once you get the hang of it, you can bring up dashboards fairly quickly. Note that it’s not for the faint of heart; there’s still a fair amount of getting your hands dirty with HTML and the glorious Pentaho XML files, but it does provide some very nifty tools for getting started.

There’s a couple things that I’d love to see added, including creating a pick list with a key-value pair and then being able to access the key for selection while displaying the values. We have a bead on how that might be changed. And the other limitation is the built-in Pentaho limit of 100 values on a pick list. I understand the Pentaho code could be modified to support a greater limit if you want to get into that.

There’s a couple other items that we’ve figured out while messing around with it. I’ve done some work on this, and we’ve added comments to the wiki (pending Pedro and Ingo’s review) on how to accomplish a couple other items:

1. How to add a change event to the dashboard components - wiki.pentaho.com/display/COM/Components?focusedCommentId=8290991#comment-8290991
2. How to add a manual refresh button - wiki.pentaho.com/display/COM/Gallery?focusedCommentId=8291017#comment-8291017

There’s a a few other techniques I’ve started to use to handle select all from pick lists, sorting the dashboard links at the top of the page as well as some page formatting things, but these are certainly a matter of style and preference on how to make the dashboard sing.

Again, kudos to Ingo and Pedro for making this kind of thing happen. It’s a nice way to get some flash to users and fill a gap that was sorely lacking in the Pentaho suite.

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