How to Create and Add a Custom Widget?

In this article:

1. What Are Widgets?
2. How to Create and Pin a Custom Widget to Your Dashboard?
    Custom Widgets: a Practical Example
3. How to Manage Your Custom Widget Settings?
4. How to Refresh Your Widget?

1. What Are Widgets?

Widgets provide summarized information and handy shortcuts directly in your custom Dashboards. They can be an excellent info point into key metrics and critical business information that is essential to your work. In Businessmap, there are two types of widgets: predefined widgets and custom widgets.

2. How to Create and Pin a Custom Widget to Your Dashboard?

You can create a custom widget using the Advanced Search functionality to generate a flexible live table, pie chart, or bar graph widgets of filtered data. With the Advanced Search, you can add almost any relevant data you want to monitor. 

To create your own custom widget, generate a filter and define your report properties from the Refine Search Criteria panel. You can apply as many filters as you need to extract the precise data you want to track. You need to save your report, so it can appear in the list of available widgets (under Custom widgets) when you click "Add widget" in a dashboard.

All your widgets live in custom dashboards you create inside Businessmap. A well-designed dashboard will keep all vital information on one screen to help you make actionable decisions. Note that each Dashboard can contain a maximum of 10 widgets.

Custom Widgets: a Practical Example

Let's use a practical example and set up a custom widget that shows all current work items, on a board of your choice, that have been "In Progress" for more than 5 days. Follow the steps below to create the widget.

Step 1: Оpen the Advanced Search feature (the magnifying glass) located at the top blue bar of your account interface. With the advanced search, you can filter and configure your account data to get specific information that concerns you, your team, or your project. 

Step 2: Click the Refine search criteria link to open a new panel and select the criteria.

To get the desired results, select the following properties: “Board,” “Cycle Time,” and “Section.” Set the Time unit to "Days" and then click Add.

Step 3:  Configure your report.

The criteria you selected will instantly appear on the left side of the "Advanced Search" panel.

• Use the dropdown and select the “Board” of your choice. 
• Use the dropdown and set up a  “Cycle Time” that is greater than 5 days.
• Use the dropdown and select the "In Progress" section.

Click the search icon to run your report.

By default, the system will display all results that match your search criteria in a table format, i.e. all cards from the selected board that have been in the In Progress section for more than 5 days.

In addition:

• You have the flexibility to configure what columns of information you want in your results. Use the Configure results button (1) at the top right corner to open the "Configure results" panel. Select any of the criteria you wish to become available as columns in the table with the results. If you want to remove any column, deselect the respective criteria, and apply the changes.
• With the available View modes (2), you can choose to display the data from your search in a bar graph or as a pie chart and slice it by certain criteria. You can even display your results in a board view mode.

Note: The example above might appear best in a table visualization when added to your custom Dashboard. However, another search generating all the cards in a board by their owners, for example, might be visualized better as a dynamic pie chart on your widget dashboard.

Step 4: To save the filter you created as a custom widget, select the Add to Dashboard icon at the bottom right side of the panel. 

Step 5: To pin this widget to your custom dashboard, you need to give it a name (1) and define the Dashboard (2). Once you add the widget, it instantly becomes available in the selected Dashboard and provides easy tracking and quick access to the respective set of data.

You can pin the same widget to multiple Dashboards. Open any of your custom Dashboards and select "Add Widget" to open a dedicated panel where all predefined and custom widgets are stored.

Once you open the panel, you can either scroll down to find your custom widget or use the filter to enter the widget's name at the top of the panel.

Each dashboard can display a combination of:

• Workspaces — add workspaces, which are relevant to the Dashboard context.  
• Widgets — add widgets including the Analytics charts, custom search reports, and Power BI reports to track critical business health metrics.
• Workspaces and widgets — combine Workspaces and Widgets in a logical group (e.g. a project workspace with the respective metrics).

Important:

Your dashboards can be shared with individual users or teams inside the account. The data visualized in the widgets depends on the permissions of each user in the system. That means that some users may see different data inside the widgets than others. You can learn more about how to manage your dashboards here.

3. How to Manage Your Custom Widget Settings?

Each widget (predefined, custom, shared) has a settings menu (the three dots icon), from which you can further customize it and complete the following actions:

• Rename: change the name of the widget.
• Clone: make a copy of the widget.
• Expand/Collapse: reduce the size of the widget's panel to make space for more widgets on your dashboard. Switch back to Full-View to expand the widget's panel. 
• Refresh: reload the widget's data.
• Settings: You have tremendous flexibility in configuring what data will be displayed by your widget.
• Boards: this option becomes available for some of the analytics widgets and allows you to change the board for which you track metrics, using a widget. 
• Export: export the widget data to a spreadsheet file.
  • Note: When exporting custom widgets created via the Advanced search, the system will create separate tabs in the exported spreadsheet for Comments and Links (if selected from the Configure results panel). The same happens when you export data directly from a search report.
• Remove: remove the widget from your custom dashboard.

4. How to Refresh Your Widget?

The information in the widgets is automatically refreshed once every 24 hours.

When you open a Dashboard, all of the widget data will load from the last cache that you have stored. If there is new data available, it will start refreshing.

You will see a refresh button appear in the top right corner of the widget and a countdown until the refresh. You can cancel the refresh by clicking on the X button.

You can also manually refresh your widgets via the refresh button, located in the settings in the three-dot menu. Alternatively, you can refresh all widgets on a given Dashboard by navigating to this menu: