Purpose

The Perfion Dashboard is a powerful tool in your daily work with product data. It has many different use cases:

Management insight

• Enable management to keep track of product volumes, workloads, process bottlenecks, etc.

Data quality control

• Quickly identify items with invalid or missing data

Process support

• Support workflows and processes to ensure that products are onboarded, enriched and published effectively.

Open

The Perfion Dashboard was introduced in Perfion 2020 R1 and relaunched with additional functionality in Perfion 2022 R2.

Dashboard setup is managed in the Perfion windows client. Dashboard usage is supported in windows and web client.

Dashboard management

Dashboards are created and managed in the windows client. Go to Administration and Dashboard Management:

Open

This will launch a window with an overview of existing Dashboards:

In the toolbar you have the following options:

Most of these actions are also available as right-click options on each dashboard.

Create or edit a dashboard

Click New to start creating a new dashboard. This will launch the following window:

Structure tab

On the Structure tab (selected by default) you manage the structure and content of the dashboard. The following elements can be used:

Sections

The first section is automatically added to the dashboard. You can rename it by double-clicking the default name. If you want to add another section, simply double click or drag New Section from the Structural Elements panel into the left panel and drop it on top of an existing section. The result could be this:

Use drag-drop or ALT + Arrow Up/Down on your keyboard to change the order of the sections

Widgets

To add a widget to your dashboard, double-click or drag it from the library on the right to the panel on the left. Drop it on top of a section (will position the widget as the last in the section) or on top of a widget (will position the new widget above the existing widget).

Use drag-drop or ALT + Arrow Up/Down on your keyboard to change the order widgets within a section.

The result could be this:

Line breaks

To add a line break to your dashboard, double-click or drag Line Break from the Structural Elements panel into the left panel. Drop it on top of a section (will position the line break last in the section) or on top of a widget (will position the new line break above the widget).

Use drag-drop or ALT + Arrow Up/Down on your keyboard to reposition the line break within a section.

The result could be this:

Name tab

On the Name tab you give the dashboard a name in relevant languages.

Access tab

On the Access tab you control who has access to the dashboard. This can be used to create dashboards targeted at specific users or user groups.

When you are done creating the dashboard, you can see the result in the client:

Widgets

Basic principle of a Perfion widget

The basic principle of a Perfion widget is quite simple. Regardless of layout, all widgets show how many items of a particular type that match a particular set of criteria. Examples:

This widget tells you, that 111 (how many) products (item type) are online in your webshop (criteria)

This widget tells you, that 13 (how many) products (item type) are missing German translations (criteria). The widget groups items by Category.

This widget tells you, that 91,49% (how many) of all products (item type) are in your catalog (criteria) and that 8,51% are not.

Create or edit a widget

Widget are managed from the Widgets option in the Dashboards toolbar:

This will open the Widget Management window where you see your widget library:

In the toolbar of this window, you have the following options:

Creating or editing a widget is done in this window:

Title/Subtitle

Enter a title and a subtitle for the widget in your primary Perfion language.

Translation

Click Translation to manage title and subtitle in other languages:

Widget Action

Widget Action works in combination with Widget Type to determine how data is presented in the widget. In Widget Action you have three options:

‘Group By’ lets you group items by a feature. As an example, you can choose to group products by category or by color. Products that do not have a value in the grouping feature are shown as Untagged. NOTE: Group by can show a maximum of eight columns. If more than eight grouping values are needed, the seven grouping values with the highest count of items are shown first while remaining values are stacked as Others in column eight

‘Has Value’ gives you a Boolean kind of logic where items either have a value in a certain feature or they don’t. As an example, products can either be in a catalog or not (= have a value in the Catalog feature or not).

‘Total Count’ simply counts the number of items that match the criteria in the widget. As an example, you can count the total number of items in Perfion.

Widget Type

Widget Type controls the graphical representation of items in your widget. It has the following options.

‘Bar Chart’ is a standard bar chart with vertical columns. This widget type works with Group by and Has Value.

‘Horizontal Bar Chart’ is a bar chart with horizontal columns. This widget type works with Group by and Has Value.

‘Pie Chart’ is a circular representation showing each count of items as a percentage of the total. This widget type works with Group by and Has Value.

‘Doughnut Chart’ is a circular representation showing each count of items as a percentage of the total. This widget type works with Group by and Has Value.

‘Count’ is simple numeric representation of number of items. This widget type is automatically selected when Total Count is used as Widget Action:

Base Feature

The Base Feature represents the type of item the widget works on. It will typically be Product, but it can be any selectable feature in your Perfion setup. This enables you to create widgets that look at products, brands, customers, images, files, etc.

Feature

Feature is used with Widget Actions Group by and Has Value (disabled with Total Count).

With Group by, the values of the selected feature (e.g. color values red, blue, green, etc) are used to group items returned by the widget (how many items have a specific value).

With Has Value, items returned by the widget are split in two groups; those that have a color value and those that don’t.

Filter

Applying a filter is one of the most central components of a widget. The filter makes sure, that only items meeting a certain set of criteria are included in the widget. Example:

A widget called ‘Missing German description’ should show items where the Description feature has no German value. This can be achieved by creating and saving a filter like this on the Product feature:

<Query>

   <Select languages='EN'>

          <Feature id='Description' />

   </Select>

   <From id='Product' />

   <Where>

          <Clause id="Description(EN)" operator="HAS" />

          <Clause id="Description(DE)" operator="NOT HAS" />

   </Where>

</Query>

When you apply this filter to the widget, the widget only returns items that meet the criteria (has an English description but does not have a German description):

View

In the View drop-down you can select a predefined view on the Base Feature. You can select a standard view, a group view, or a customized view. The selected view is automatically applied to the grid when the user clicks an element in the widget.

Building on the Filter example, you want users to see the Description feature in the grid when they click an element in the widget. This can be achieved by creating and applying a customized view called Translations (or anything you choose) which contains the Description feature.

Refresh mode

In the Refresh mode drop-down, you can specify whether content of the widget should be refreshed On every load or Scheduled/Manual.

‘On every load’ means that content of widget is refreshed every time a user loads a dashboard with that widget. It is very useful when up-to-date content is critical, but the downside is that it takes longer time to load that dashboard.

‘Scheduled/Manual’ means that content of widget is only refreshed when a user specifically asks for the widget to be refreshed or when the Perfion Scheduler runs a refresh-action on that widget (see the Perfion Scheduler guide for instructions on how to set this up). This is useful for widgets that take a long time to refresh and where up-to-date content is not critical.

Used on dashboards

This section simply shows on which dashboards the widget is used.

Preview area

The right side of the Widget management window shows a preview of what the widget will look like for users. You can choose to use example data (fast rendering) or live data (slower rendering) by checking/unchecking the box below the widget.

Using dashboards and widgets

General use

The Dashboard option in the Sections menu automatically shows up for users who have access to at least one dashboard. When clicked, the first dashboard the user has access to (Product Management) is loaded:

From here, the user can click any element of any widget to see related items. In this example, user clicked Cups in the widget Missing product images:

Notice the following:

• The widget loaded two cups because these do not have a value in the Image feature

• The widget applied the view Mandatory images since this was selected in the widget setup

  • User can change to any other view as normal

• Data in the grid is editable as normal

• Right click on the Widget to export and print the widget

Refreshing dashboard structure and widget data

Dashboard structure and widget data can be refreshed in three different ways.

Refreshing data in a single widget

Consider the example above. When user adds the missing images to the two cups, he/she can click the Refresh-icon in the widget to update data in the widget. The widget in the example is updated like this:

Refreshing dashboard structure without reloading widget data

To load changes to dashboard structure (new dashboards, sections, line breaks and widgets) without reloading widget data (which can take some time), simply select a “normal” Perfion section (e.g. Products) and then go back to Dashboard.

Reloading dashboard structure AND widget data

To reload dashboard structure (new dashboards, sections, line breaks and widgets) AND widget data, simply click the Reload-icon in the main dashboard (top right corner). This may take some time depending on the size of your Perfion database and the number and complexity of widgets.

NOTE: When a user refreshes data in one or more widgets, the refreshed data is saved in shared widget cache-tables. This means that all users will see refreshed data in the same widget(s) without running a refresh themselves.

Page Navigation

Guide Navigation