Dashboards portal application

Upon installing the Dashboard Client component by the WebSphere® Business Monitor Launchpad, a new portlet application named WebSphere Business Monitor v6.0 - Dashboard Client Concrete Application is added to the WebSphere Portal portlet applications list. This application is the container of several portlets so that each portlet in the application represents a specific WebSphere Business Monitor dashboard view.

You can access the new WebSphere Business Monitor portlet application through the Applications page under the Portlet Management section in Portal Administration. Through this page, you can perform a set of activities on each application. You can also display the list of views (portlets) contained in this portlet application by clicking the portlet application name. Alternatively, you can directly manage the different views through the Portlets page under the Portlet Management section in Portal Administration where a list of all portlets (including Monitor Dashboard Views) installed on the portal is displayed. You can search for dashboard views by any search type available, and hence you can perform a set of activities on each view.

The following are the common activities that you can perform on either the WebSphere Business Monitor portlet application or on any of its views:

When the Dashboard Client is installed into WebSphere Portal for the first time. The portlets in this case are named Concrete Portlets. You can have more than one concrete portlet of the same portlet by making copies of the first concrete portlets so that these copies will have the same default initial configuration.

When the administrator adds a specific concrete portlet (view) to a portal page (dashboard), an instance of the concrete portlet will be created (Concrete Portlet Instance). This instance will have a set of configuration parameters that differs from the initial configuration according to the changes made by the administrator when he configured the concrete portlet instance in the page. Similarly, you can have multiple instances of the same concrete portlet by adding this concrete portlet to different pages. But in this case the configuration of each instance will be the same as the configuration of the first concrete portlet instance. That's to say they'll not obtain the initial configuration from the concrete portlet before making the changes, but they will have the configuration after the change.

When a user edit the view in a page, which is a concrete portlet instance, a specific instance of this concrete portlet instance will be created named User Portlet Instance that will have a special configuration parameters displayed only for this user in the current active session. You can also have multiple user portlet instances for the same concrete portlet instance, and each user portlet instance will obtain its first configuration settings from its source concrete portlet instance.

From all above, it will be mandatory to create copies of the shipped views (concrete portlet) prior to adding them to the portal pages to keep the default initial views configuration unchanged and thus avoid having the configuration settings of this view applied, whenever you want to add another instance of the view.

Related tasks
Administering dashboards and views
Related reference
WebSphere Portal information

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