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The App Interaction SIG compiled a list of use-cases for the dashboard in 2022. Dashboard Use Cases The lengthy list of cases mostly shortcuts to displaying data that might otherwise be cumbersome to obtain through standard search UI. To summarize, challenging queries like users with recently updated permissions, or patrons with fees/fines, lost or overdue items above a specified amount. Users with patron groups that are soon to expire.
Next steps for any team that wants to create/display a widget on Dashboard app
Review the use cases and prioritize/fulfill any backend capabilities with those features. If the backend can’t already resolve a particular query, the dashboard won’t be able to provide an option for it!
Design and implement a widget form that might conform to a number of use cases, given adequate information from associated meta-information about the data.
Can use the currently supported query language KIWT
OR create a new widget that supports CQL
Expose the proper meta-information from backend modules (
dashboardinterface)Expose UI display resources through the frontend registry.
The
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questions
How can these current implementations be improved?
How easily could the Dashboard app leverage FQM and/or the Lists app?
Are there better ways aside from polling an interface to obtain meta-information about data sources
Could the front-end provide rendering methods in a way that would depend less on the monolithic bundle in the current state of FOLIO platforms? In a way that didn’t require all of the provided presentation code to be present at the time some centralized event is triggered?
Could query-building be shaped in a way that leverages recently run queries in the system? Would that be useful?
How receptive would the users be for a query builder that got their hands a bit dirtier with the raw data, allowing them deeper display customization and query control?
The future
The ideal solution for a dashboard system is a feature that will be capable of gracefully sitting atop a potentially changing, modular platform and have a ‘sit and forget’ agnosticism to change, fulfilled by existing work that’s achieved as part of the standard process for developing FOLIO modules, frontend and backend.
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