Leveraging a Third Party Reporting Tool to Create a Customizable Dashboard System
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Abstract
The La Salle Dashboard System combines a homegrown, MVC (Model-View-Controller) based PHP application with our reporting tool Argos to provide a rich set of customizable dashboards to end-users. All queries are stored in datablocks created in Argos, and this data is retrieved at an interval that an IT administrator can set via the Argos API (application programming interface) and stored in the dashboard system. When a user accesses a specified dashboard, the data is retrieved from the internal system and displayed in the appropriate type of chart. Because the queries are not being run on demand, the dashboards load almost instantaneously.
This system allows users to be grouped by department, and admins in each department can grant new users access to their dashboards. This added feature solves a major issue with Argos's own dashboard system in that all new users would have needed to be added to the system by an IT employee; end users could not manage access themselves.