Did you ever build an amazing Tableau CRM Dashboard with a lot of pages to simulate website like behavior? You created all this functionality and then you are asked to add another chart or grain level to the dashboard? You are looking for a way to speed up your development process and reduce maintenance?
You have basically 2 options now to solve this. One is the the old way, you could add more pages to integrate the new functionality but you will hit a 20 page limit and you need to consider any changes on all the clones you created during the process, which can be quite a headache.
Or you use the feature “Components” and speed up your development process. Yes, that simple.
What is a Component?
You might have heard of it or already used it and might already be aware how powerful it can be. A component allows you to nest a Dashboard in a Dashboard … you guessed it, that opens totally new opportunities especially on the development side as you can add a new level of user experience with much less work and potentially complexity.
Why Components?
Here a few advantages I have seen using the future in Enterprise scale developments.
- Bypassing the page layout limit of 20
- Reduce complexity of Dashboards due to volume of pages and redundant information (did I de-link the widget or not when I cloned…we all have been there)
- Reuse the same lens in different dashboards (one time effort)
- This opens a new dashboard architecture approach!
- Avoid Bindings in some cases (less code, less complexity, easier to test, easier knowledge transfer, more robust ….)
- Lower effort to maintain dashboards and error reduction as there is only one place to adjust and modify
- Regular facetting is working
- Option to integrate Lightning Web Components (LWC)!!!
Let’s use an example to showcase the benefits. What better place to start with a full blown template the TCRM team already built in the app finder. You can simply enable the app “Customer Insights” in your instance to see how the TCRM team is envisioning to use the component functionality.
When you open the app you will find 4 charts in the Case Dashboard. I will use just the top 2 as the idea is the same on all the charts.
One thing we can see already in edit mode, is that the Dashboard consists just of only one page. You might think that makes sense as the case breakdown could be done with a binding (interaction) and you are right…..but in this case no Binding is used at all.
Each of those chart tiles represent nested Dashboards which each have 2 pages to create the breakdown. In the nested Dashboards there is no binding/interaction either as they simply created the specific view and link the different pages/views with the toggle buttons which in those cases are simple navigation buttons. Very simple but powerful approach.
To see the linked components you can simply click on the widget which opens the WIDGET parameters on the right navigation bar. Here you will see additional parameters but for now we focus only on the “Edit Component” button which will open another Dashboard with the 2 pages mentioned above.
Component modification
When you open the embedded Component you will come across a warning dialogue. This step is actually very important as you want to make sure you don’t create unnecessary copies of the embedded version. If you end up with too many versions it might be difficult in the long run to embed the same widget in another dashboard so you can benefit from the central changes. I usually go with “Edit Original” unless I know I want to test something and I’m not sure yet it will work.
The component is now opened in the “Component designer” and you have the same dashboard building experience as you would have in the “Dashboard Designer” without the option to use a Component widget in a Component again. So far the only way to access those components is when you add the component widget into the dashboard and then you can select which component you want to add (if there is already one existent) or if you want to create a new component.
After you finished your component simply “save” the Component and you will be forwarded back to your original Dashboard. Make sure you hit the “Refresh Content” button first in the Component widget before you validate your changes in the Dashboard. I would recommend to refresh the complete Dashboard as I sometimes experienced some glitches with the rendering of the component. This might save you some confusion down the road.
Use case examples for Components
- Detail table in different grain level and show them as option to toggle.
- Company branding header
- Toggle between different chart types
- Workaround to avoid bindings
- many more
Change-sets
When you are deploying Dashboards with Components from one org into another org, makes sure you captured the Component as well. The easiest way is to check in the dependencies for the correct Component name.
Limitations
Before you use Components there are some limitations you should be aware off.
- You can’t integrate bindings from your main dashboard into the component widget currently
- Broadcast of faceting is applied to the complete component not for parts of it.
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