Panel Development Process

To develop panels, you first need to be sure that you have the right data. If you are using s-Dashboard with StreamLab, this means moving back and forth between dashboards and StreamLab. If you are using s-Dashboard directly with s-Server, this may involve creating new views on the data in s-Server (or having a SQL developer create such views). Once you get the right data flowing into your panel, you may also want to adjust how that data flows (in terms of how many rows appear at once, for example). Finally, you can customize the appearance of the panel itself.

  • Getting the Right Data Available
  • Making Sure Your Data Suits the Visualization
  • Adjusting the Panel’s Input
  • Customizing Your Panel’s Appearance

Getting the Right Data Available

The first step is to make sure that s-Server has the stream, view, or table that you want to display, and that this object has the right data. For example, most panels require numerical data, and if your stream, view, or table doesn’t have numerical data, you will not be able to use s-Dashboard’s graphic visualizations (though you can still display this data in a table).

To confirm that your stream, view, or table has the right data, open s-Dashboard and use the Select Input dialog to open the stream, view, or table:

Making Sure Data Suits Your Visualization

If you open a visualization, though, you may find that the data doesn’t suit your visualization:

“loginFailureCount” and “amount” seem right for a dials display, but not “accountNumber” or “lat” or “lon”. (On the other hand, these values might be just fine for a Geographical Stream panel.) One solution is to create a new view in s-Server with only the two desired columns, as in the screen shot below. (You may need to work with a SQL programmer to create this view.)

You can learn more about views in the CREATE VIEW topic of the SQLstream Streaming SQL Reference Guide.

Basically, though, views are reusable SELECTs on a stream. The view depicted above looks something like this in SQL:

create or replace view "MOCHI"."SuspectDebitOverview" as SELECT STREAM "amount", "loginFailureCount" from "MOCHI"."SuspectDebits";

Adjusting Panel Input

Using the Input Preferences panel, you can specify how much data to show. This might be twenty rows at once, all rows from the past hour, twenty rows per key category, and so on. See s-Dashboard Input Overview for more details.

Customizing a Panel’s Appearance

Once you get the data right, your next step is to customize the panel. The View Latest Row: Bar Chart, for example, lets you change the colors of the bars, bar border, and hover color. (You can do much more by taking advantage of Chart.js.)

You should experiment with Panel Preferences to get your desired effect. See Using Panel Preferences for more details.