After several posts of theory, it’s time to build something. In this post, I will walk you through a Visual Designer tutorial to create a complete Contracts dashboard on the M-Files Sample Vault. Therefore, no JSON editing is required at all. The Visual Designer is the primary authoring path for most administrators. Power users who prefer hand-editing JSON can write…
So far in this series I have covered what an end user sees, the anatomy of a dashboard definition, the seven widget types (scalar, trend, and the rest), the query side, including the aggregations. Time to look at the surface where the administrator actually spends time: the Dashboard tab in M-Files Admin. This is also where the Visual Designer lives.…
In the previous post, I walked through the query side of the dashboard JSON: objectType, class, filters, date tokens. What I deliberately left out was the aggregation block, because it deserves its own post. The aggregation is what transforms the set of matching objects into a value the widget can render. There are five aggregation types, six reducers, and one…
In the previous posts of this series, I covered the anatomy of a dashboard definition and the seven widget types (KPI & gauge, line & area, donut, bar & table) the engine supports, as of now. In this one, we will go through the Business Dashboard queries, i.e. the query section that I pretty much ignores so far. It is…
This is the third and final widget post of the series. The previous two covered scalar widgets (Post 4a) and trend widgets (Post 4b). What is left is the distribution and tabular widgets: donut, bar, and table. The grouping is loose but useful: donut and bar answer questions like “how does my population break down into categories?”, while table can…
This is the second widget post of the series, focused on the two trend widgets: line and area. The previous one covered scalar widgets (Post 4a). Since these two widgets are closely related, it made sense to bundle them together in the same post. Both surface a single value per category or per time bucket, plotted across a horizontal axis.…
This is the first widget-specific post of the series. As a reminder, the previous post mapped the anatomy of a dashboard definition. From here on, I go widget by widget. I have grouped the seven widget types into three families: The reason kpiNumber and gauge sit together is that they accept exactly the same aggregation type (summary) and they share…
In the previous post, I walked through what an end user sees when they open the Business Dashboard pane in M-Files. From this post on, the audience shifts more towards the administrator’s side, looking at what a dashboard definition looks like. Every dashboard is a single JSON document. The Admin tab in M-Files Admin offers a Visual Designer that builds…
In the first post of this series, I introduced the Business Dashboard module I built, over the past few weeks, for M-Files. This second post is for the end user: what does it actually look like, where is it, and what can you do with it once your administrator has configured one or more dashboards for you. No JSON in…
Some time ago, a customer asked whether it was possible, in M-Files, to have dashboards with KPIs and a global overview of what was happening in their vault. It was a topic I had in my radar for a few years already, but I never had – or took – the time to really work on it. I jumped on…
