Configuring a Dashboard

Once you have created a Heavy Immerse dashboard, you can configure the look and feel of the dashboard and manipulate the charts in various ways.

Configuring the Dashboard User Interface

You can customize the look and feel of charts in a dashboard with the user interface settings (UI Settings) panel. You can adjust settings for fonts, labels, and color palettes. Setting are applied to all charts on the dashboard. Customizing the user interface, you can make charts easier to read in presentations by increasing font size, or create a color scheme that matches company branding.

To open the UI Settings panel, click the Palette icon in the upper left of the dashboard.

The UI Settings panel has three sections:

• Chart fonts

• Chart Settings

• Color palette

Use the Reset dashboard settings button to cancel any changes and revert to the default settings set by the admin or a superuser; if no dashboard settings have been set, settings revert to the Immerse default.

• By default, the UI Settings panel is enabled for all users. To disable the UI Settings panel for non-superusers, set ui/show_ui_config_panel to false in your servers.json file. You can also enable and disable Label defaults and Color palette in the UI Settings panel for non-superusers with theui/show_ui_config_panel_axis_trunc and ui/show_ui_config_panel_color_palette flags.

• Any changes made to fonts, labels, and colors in UI Settings are applied to all charts on the dashboard and override all other settings.

• If you do not save the settings, any changes are removed if you close the dashboard.

Modifying Chart Fonts

You can increase and decrease the size of chart, axis, tooltip, legend, and top section control fonts. You can also make the font bold. Click the A-, A+, and Bold icons to adjust font size and weight.

You can set font sizes from 6 to 24 points. To increase the brightness of the font color, toggle on Use high contrast font colors. Experiment with font size and contrast to see what works best for your dashboard.

Setting Chart Margins and Label Length

You can configure the amount of space between charts on your dashboard using the Chart margin slider. In Chart settings, set the margin value by moving the slider, or enter the pixel value.

You can increase and decrease the length of axis labels in charts to make them easier to read.

For example, on this dashboard, the chart margin is set to 0. The Axis truncation length is set to 19, which makes the airline and city values unreadable.

Increasing the truncation length to 100 reveals the carrier name and the origin city for each bar. Increasing the margin sets more space on the dashboard between charts.

Customizing Colors

The Color palette section of UI Settings has four subsections, each of which corresponds to an individual "colors" section in "customStyles" in your servers.json file.

Color palette	servers.json "colors"	Definition
Color set 1	solid	Solid colors. All measures are assigned one color. The array of colors you provide defines which colors are available.
Color set 2	custom	Custom colors. These are the options available in Color by Dimension.
Categorical colors	ordinal	4 scales, 1 or more colors each scale. Defines a range of colors that measures iterate through repeatedly. The size of the range can vary.
Continuous colors	quantitative	4 scales, 1 or more colors each scale. Quantitative measures produce smooth, continuous gradients between each "stopping point" defined in the list of colors, in order.

Adding or changing a color on the Color palette overrides that color in servers.json.

To add a color to Color set 1 or Color set 2, click the plus icon (+) in the section you want to edit, add the hexadecimal value for the color, and click the Save icon.

To change or delete an existing color in Color set 1 or Color set 2, click the color and then either change the hexadecimal value for the color, or click the Delete icon to delete it. Each color set must have at least one color.

In Categorical colors and Continuous colors, you can add a new palette, edit an existing palette, or delete a palette. Click the dropdown to see currently existing palettes and options for adding, editing, or deleting. Each palette must have between 2 and 10 colors. For Categorical colors, the dropdown shows the following.

Clicking a palette enables you to edit it by adding, changing, and deleting colors in the same way you do for Color set 1 and Color set 2.

Administrator Capabilities

If you are an admin or superuser, you can assign settings defined in the UI Settings panel as default settings for a database.

To save the current changes to the panel or the current saved dashboard settings as the database default, click the Save settings as default button in the Configure defaults section.

The save setting button is disabled if there are no changes to the panel, if there are no saved dashboard styles, or if the styles are the same as the default.

Clicking Save settings as default shows the following caution.

Click Set as database default only if you are sure that you want each new dashboard created to use the defined settings.

If the database is configured with a default mapd user, that user cannot modify database-level UI configuration settings and receives an error that reads “Error setting configuration” when attempting to do so. To work around this issue, you can:

• Create a new superuser and use that to set database-level configurations.

• Create a new user and assign it the immerse_db_config role.

• Rename the mapd user to a different user name.

Clicking Reset to original UI settings in the UI Settings panel resets any database defaults to the system default. If no database defaults are saved, the button is disabled.

Saving settings as default for a database does not overwrite any existing dashboards that have custom UI Interface settings.

Adding Annotations

You can add annotations to any New Combo charts on your dashboard.

To add an annotation:

1. On the dashboard, click the Edit annotations icon:

The icon changes to indicate that annotation is enabled. Click the See More Options arrow to the right of the icon to toggle annotation visibility on and off.

2. Click the chart information you want to annotate, and then add the annotation text in the text box. Here, American Eagle Airlines number of records bar is selected.

3. You can edit the annotation:

• To edit the text, click in the annotation text box and type any changes.

• To move the annotation, drag the text box to the desired location.

• To resize the annotation, select it and use the text box handles.

• To adjust the font, change the Annotation labels font in UI Settings Chart fonts.

• To delete hit, hover over the annotation and then click the Delete this annotation icon.

• Annotations appear in the New Combo chart when you open it to edit.

• Annotations are tied to the data selection. For example, if cross-filtering changes the value of the selected data, the annotation remains the same.

Moving and Resizing Charts

To move a chart within a dashboard, click the title bar and drag the chart to the new location. If there is already at that location, it moves aside.

To resize the chart, click on the lower right corner of the chart and drag to change the size.

Duplicating a Chart

You can add a duplicate of an existing chart to your dashboard. To add a duplicate chart:

1. Hover the mouse over the chart you want to duplicate.

2. In the upper-right corner of the chart, click the More Options icon, and then click Duplicate Chart.

A duplicate of the chart is created with the same title, with (Copy) appended. Multiple duplicates result in (Copy 2), (Copy 3), and so on, appended to the original chart title.

When you add a duplicate chart to the dashboard, the dashboard is marked unsaved; to save the duplicate chart, you must save the dashboard.

Exporting Chart and Dashboard Images

Exporting images is currently beta functionality.

You can export both chart and dashboard images. Chart export is enabled by default; dashboard export is disabled by default.

Set the following feature flags in servers.json to enable image export:

• ui/enable_chart_image_export : true|false

• ui/enable_dashboard_image_export : true|false

To export a chart image as a PNG file, click Export as image on the chart’s More options menu.

To download and entire dashboard, click the Camera icon on the top bar.

Image export may take a few seconds to download.

Cross-Filtering

When you add more than one chart to a dashboard, filters on one chart affect all other charts on the dashboard.

For example, the dashboard below shows UFO Sightings in various countries.

If you click the bar for Great Britain (gb) on the “Sightings by Country” chart, the other charts are filtered, as well.

For more examples, see Using Filters.

Multisource Dashboards

You can choose different data sources for individual charts on your dashboard. This lets you look for visual correlations in datasets that are not directly connected.

For example, these charts compare immigration rates to UFO sightings. Glasgow looks suspicious.

Linking Charts

You can link map charts on a Dashboard so that if you zoom or pan on one of the charts, any linked charts zoom or pan in the same way. Synchronizing makes it easier to coordinate the zoom and focus of different charts, so you do not have to manipulate them individually to get the views that you want.

By default, linked charts are disabled. To enable chart linking, set ui/enable_linked_zoom to ON in servers.json.

Charts that can be linked have a link icon in the upper left corner. Clicking it syncs the map with any other maps enabled for sync. You can unlink a map by clicking the icon again.

3_sync-charts-1.png

If you change the zoom or pan of a linked map, any other linked maps change in the same way. For example, the two maps below are linked, indicated by the grayed link that appears in the upper left of the map. The zoom and focus of the two maps are different at this point.

3_sync-charts-2.png

Clicking Zoom out on the map on the right not only syncs the zoom of the other map, it also pans that map so they both have the same focus.

3_sync-charts-3.png

Downloading Chart Data

You can download data for individual charts on your dashboard. For all chart types, you can download data in .csv format and view the CSV files in a typical spreadsheet application, like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. For Choropleth, Linemap, and Pointmap charts, you can also download data in geoJSON and geoJSONL format.

The downloaded data matches exactly the data represented in the chart at the time of export; this includes any filters, binning, domain settings, or other settings.

To download chart data in CSV format, in the upper-right corner of the chart, click the More Options icon, and then click Download CSV.

The CSV file is downloaded to the default downloads folder for your browser.

Any nested data (for example, a histogram with stacked data) is flattened.

To download geo chart data:

1. In the upper-right corner of the chart, click the More Options icon, and then click Export Data.

2. In the Download Data dialog box:

• Select the file format you want to download.

• Select whether to use gzip compression.

• For multilayer charts, select the layer to download from the drop-down list.

• Set the filename and GeoJSON layer name, and click Download.

Refreshing a Dashboard

If you update your dataset, you can update your dashboard by using the Refresh icon in Immerse.

1. Click Refresh.

   
2. Choose Refresh Now.

   

If you have streaming data continually updating your dataset, you can set an interval to automatically refresh your dashboard.

1. Click Refresh.

2. Click Auto Refresh.

3. Choose an interval (for example, 2 Minutes).

To turn off Auto Refresh, set the interval to Off.

Using your browser refresh button ends your session and requires you to log in again.

Dark Mode

You can change your Heavy Immerse interface to display in Dark Mode.

To display Immerse in Dark Mode, click the User icon in the upper right and choose SWITCH TO DARK MODE.

Dark Mode can enhance the contrast and readability of your charts. I am joking, of course. You use Dark Mode because it looks awesome.

To change back to light mode, click the User icon in the upper right and choose SWITCH TO LIGHT MODE.

• The theme setting is saved on the browser you are currently using. The setting does not affect other machines or other browsers you might use

• When you create a map, the theme defaults to Current Immerse Theme. This is necessary to automatically update a map when you toggle themes. You can still explicitly choose Light Mode or Dark Mode, but if you do so the map stays in that theme, regardless of the Immerse theme. Existing maps have a hard coded theme and are currently going to stay that way. HEAVY.AI recommends that you use Current Immerse Theme, unless you want the map to always display in Light Mode or Dark Mode.

• You can also configure the theme in the servers.json/servers.local.json file. Add a new key for theme and set it to dark. If you set no key, the default is light.

• The system theme setting only takes effect if you have never switched themes. Once you choose your own preferred theme, it always overrides the system setting.