Chapter 10. Embed, Deploy, and Debug

Usually, one of the request from customers is to embed dashboards in a third party application. Using RequireJS, doing so is simple and very flexible. You can build mini dashboards that you can easily embed into your application without interfering with the dashboard's default behavior. In this chapter, you will learn how to embed both CDF and CDE dashboards into third-party applications and will explore some considerations.

In all the earlier chapters, you learned how to build a dashboard using CDF and/or CDE. But when we are developing them, we may face some problems, and it would be great to know what should we be looking for. In this chapter, you will get information on how you can debug the dashboard using the developer tools in your browser.

One of the last phases of a project is delivery to the customer or internally to a department, or any other issue that you find. In this chapter, you will also learn some concepts that will help you deploy a project...

Embedding dashboards

A frequent question or request that I get from customers is how to embed the dashboards in another application. To be honest, the process before RequireJS was introduced into CDF was quite hard and was not interesting. The possibilities, and I will not get into details of them, were to use an HTML iframe, but this came with a lot of problems later on, it was not really suitable for mobiles, and it was bad from the usability point of view. Another option would be to use html div integration, but that created conflicts in JavaScript libraries and in the CSS, so it might create a mess when styling your pages.

With the use of RequireJS, the process is much more simple and flexible, and does not cause big issues. Of course, you might find some minor issues, but they can be easily identified and fixed. The process of embedding a CDF and a CDE dashboard is different, even if the base concepts are quite similar.

Of course, the first step before embedding a dashboard, is to create...

Debugging

When we are developing a dashboard, we may face problems and we need to know where to look for solutions. Many of the problems we face when developing a dashboard can be identified using the developer tools in your browser.

I usually use Chrome, so the examples here are based on the developer tools of this browser. The version that was used while writing this was 46.0.2490.86 (64-bit). Anyhow, if you are using Firefox, you also have developer tools, or you can install Firebug, a developer tool that does not come installed by default. To be honest, I find the developer tools of Internet Explorer to be very poor, even if they are getting better in the latest versions of the browser. Anyhow, we must use them when we are debugging problems that only exist in this browser.

Do not forget to test your dashboard on all of the browsers.

Browser compatibility

Like any other web page, a dashboard can work in one browser and fail to execute in another browser. Every browser has an engine, and...

Delivering a solution

Before delivering a solution, you need to consider some aspects of the project. In reality, and as we saw earlier, they should be considered at the start of the project when everything is being planned. There are some phases of the project that are usually part of a successful project and can save you some time, but they can also help you create a better relationship with the customer and achieve a greater level of satisfaction. The documentation and knowledge transfer are two of those tasks, and another one is deploying a project and version control for our code.

Version control and deploying projects

You can't afford to lose your work, do you? Can you also spend most lots of lying changes for development to quality acceptance tests or production environment?

It's an important part of development that you keep all the code in a version control system. All content developed with or for Pentaho should be treated as a software artefact and tested and controlled as such....

How to get help and help others

If you are an enterprise user, you have access to support (CDA, CDF, CDE, and CGG, which are the supported tools), but when you are not, how should you proceed? Well, you have multiple ways to solve your problem, and of course that will also be dependent on the problem you have found, the way you phrase the question, and how much information you are requesting. When you're not an enterprise user, you have some options. You will probably get a quick answer, but don't be disappointed if you don't—just try again.

For any and each of the ways to get help (even if it's enterprise support), you should always provide the most information you can. This includes the context of the problem that's happening. You should provide a good and clear description of the problem, a sample when ever possible (even if you need to create it with sample data), and/or screenshots when it makes sense to do so. You should also provide the configurations that are not there by default...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to embed CFD and CDE dashboards in third-party applications. You saw that we must first embed CDF or CDE and then embed the dashboards. When embedding a CDE dashboard, there are two ways to do it. When embedding, it might also be important to receive information from, and send it to, the dashboard or create links between dashboards, and for that we can make use of events.

We also talked about some aspects of the delivery of dashboards, which should also include documentation and knowledge transfers. Depending on who we are delivering the solution to, the technical level of the knowledge transfer and documentation might be quite different. Version control is an important part of the process when developing a dashboard; this is not part of the delivery, but it might be part of the deployment, so we discussed it in this chapter.

Finally, we covered where and how you can get help or a solution to your problems when developing dashboards using CTools. You...