In the last Development Series I concluded a brief overview of the PMF dashboard and broke down some of the major components. I touched just on the tip of the iceberg of what makes the PMF dashboard tick. As the release of 522 draws near, it feels like perfect timing to spend some time looking at a couple new features that have been added that should help you in development.

Some of the new features in the PMF dashboard designer I’m going to discuss revolve around better maneuverability and placement of gadgets on the canvas. Some of these features include a new ruler at the top and left of the page for orientation. We added the ability to drag vertical/horizontal guidelines on the screen for easy alignment of the gadgets. The guideline feature allows you to drag gadgets to this line and they will “snap to” for alignment. Using this should make it easy to align several gadgets along in a row. Screen resolution settings were added that uses the guideline technology to display standard screen sizes. This should be helpful dictating whether your dashboard content will be visible within some of the common screen settings. We even added in multi-select drag capability that users have asked for that allows grabbing multiple blocks to move around and snap to guidelines or gadgets. This is activated simply by holding down the Ctrl button and clicking each gadget you would like to move (just like in Windows). When developing this feature I noticed it was a nice way to promptly reveal the exact positions of all blocks on the page as all borders become visible and clickable.

Above I mentioned only a few of the usability features that were added to the dashboard designer in 522. There are many other features that will be in 522 to help speed development. A couple of these are allowing the ability to add and register new gadgets from the designer and allowing a catalog search as well.

Next time we’ll get into the bricks and mortar of the dashboard. Please post feedback if there is anything you would like discussed.

Best regards,
Michael Paul
Senior Software Developer
WebFOCUS Performance Management

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Bob Jude Ferrante,