Building Dashboards

At the core of most dashboards, is a set of VT Reports that extract information from the database. These are written in Structured Query Language (SQL) and Venture Tracker will be installed with a set of example reports.

Dashboards are built up in a hierarchical fashion using a number of different display methods, or Dashboard Panels, each of which rely on one of the underlying SQL reports.

VT provides a simple dashboard to run individual reports. An example is shown below:

The interface allows reports to be tuned and refreshed, the underlying SQL to be viewed (maybe to copy for the start of a new report) and also for the data to be exported in a number of formats (CSV is shown in this example).

Once a report has been created, it can be re-run at any time.

Creating and editing reports is controlled by user level permissions, but any logged in user of VT can see and run existing reports.

Once a report has been set up and is working as desired, it can be shown on a custom dashboard in simple tabular form using the Table Panel

Another basic form of dashboard component is a set of customisable widgets, each displaying a statistic measured within Venture Tracker. An example is shown here.

Each widget shows the result of an individual VT Report – either from a specific SQL function such as COUNT, or simply the count of the rows returned in a basic report, e.g. “List all companies with a Female Founder” may be an SQL report that finds 27 matching companies.

It could be displayed as a 27 row table using the Table Panel, as above, or used directly in summary form in a widget as shown above. This also illustrates some of the flexibility within VT. By writing reports in this way, they can be reused and displayed in different ways on dashboards.

Once you have created a few widgets, they can be organised for display in a dashboard panel called a MiniStats Panel. Here is an example:

The next dashboard panel type is the Chart Panel. Here is an example of a simple pie chart, again based upon an existing VT Report.

Pie charts and tabular data can also be automatically combined:

More chart types are available within the VT system and these will be made available to users for custom dashboards in the near future.

Once we have configured each of the reports and display panels, we can create custom dashboards which will be available on the main dashboard menu for all users.

A dashboard is therefore a sequence of panels with some additional configuration options for each panel such as width on page, order on page etc.