Chapter 3. UI Components

In this chapter, we will start to create our eFashion dashboard project using the data extracted from the eFashion database, as we explained in our previous chapter. In this project, we will follow the design and sketches that we already introduced in the previous chapter based on the requirements gathered during the business requirement gathering process in the project initiation phase.

We already learned how to import data to our dashboard, as this is the first step in the dashboard creation process. In this chapter, we will move to the next step, and we will start creating our model by adding charts and single value components to our dashboard canvas. Then, we will learn how to link them with the imported data. In the remaining chapters, we will learn how to add other dashboard components, such as maps, selectors, and so on. After this, we will learn how to export and publish our dashboards in Chapter 8, Exporting, Publishing, and Importing Dashboards.

Charts are the main dashboard components that we will use to create our dashboards. Selecting the chart is very important, and we need to select the right chart to help us get the maximum value of the presented information. The main idea of this book is to not only to help you learn how to create dashboards using SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, but also to show you how to create informative and user friendly dashboards based on many best practices and design tips that we will present while progressing through this chapter.

Single value dashboard components are another type of components that we can use inside the dashboard to represent a single metric only, and this is why we call it single value component.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Preparing our canvas and setting our document properties
• Adding our first chart dashboard component to our dashboard (pie chart)
• Linking chart with data
• Configuring main chart's properties
• Handling the missing data
• Introducing other chart types
• Adding our single value component to our dashboard
• Introducing other single value components

So, let's start working on our dashboard project.