Focal Point
Possible to export & import a dashboard design?

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July 27, 2010, 12:35 PM
Moogle
Possible to export & import a dashboard design?
Hi Team,

Here's my question:

Is it possible to export / extract dashboard designs (public and private) and then import them into a different PMF environment?

Here's why I'm asking:

This has to do with release / change management. Say we have a Dev and a Prod environment. We do work in Dev, such as setup new Measures and Dimensions. When the time comes to deploy to Prod, we don't want to re-key all our work, so we do a backup of Dev and Restore it on top of Prod. This moves all our changes over from Dev, but would over-write any dashboards that were created in Prod.

So, I think I need a way to save all the dashboards in Prod. Then, I could deploy the entire pmf_datamart from Dev onto Prod and then import the saved dashboards. That would be perfect deployment, although there's still the matter of re-synchronizing MRE users.

Please advise.

Cheers,

Joey


-WebFOCUS 8.2.01 on Windows
July 27, 2010, 12:47 PM
Bob Jude Ferrante
We have a plan to make entire dashboards exportable, but this isn't built yet. It won't get built this year.

Overall there are requests coming from customers to allow various discrete elements to be exportable. This would get included in that overall project. It's a big project though and won't see the light of day until the next MAJOR release cycle.

Not that great of an answer; however if you think it through, it's a real toughy to solve, since an exported dashboard design might include gadgets that aren't in the target system either; and you don't want to unintentionally clone existing gadgets that might already be in the target system, either. In some ways this is similar to the problem of exporting scorecards and metrics - there are child dependencies.

So for now, the answer is you take all the dashboards in when you do a snapshot restore from the pervious system in the chain into the target system (e.g. dev/QA/prod). You get everything - the metrics, the scorecards, the dashboards, the gadgets.

Anything more granular depends on a bunch of work we still have to do. We know you want it. We're looking at it. But it's not a quick fix.

Hope this helps.

thanks


Bob Jude Ferrante
Director of Business and Development
WebFOCUS Performance Management
Bob_Ferrante@ibi.com
917-339-5105

I'll take any questions about PMF - business or technical - anytime!

January 17, 2014, 04:20 AM
stuey
Bob,
As we are (very) newbies re PMF, this is one of the questions that we are being asked right now , i.e. control of deployment through environments.
Was this facility (that was mentioned 4 years ago) ever developed and released? If so, where can i find it, and is there any doc related to it that i can read ?


WF 8005 MRE BID RCaster DevStu PMF 5.3.1 Hotfix 5
XP Oracle.
January 17, 2014, 04:24 AM
stuey
Profile Updated to reflect correct WF Release.


WF 8005 MRE BID RCaster DevStu PMF 5.3.1 Hotfix 5
XP Oracle.
January 17, 2014, 09:54 AM
Ian Dalton
Stuey, Have a look at the Take a Snapshot option under Manage Tab, DataMart. Once done copy snapshot file to new box and the Restore a Snapshot. Might be of use.


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