Select the Best Option to Render Dashboards

As an administrator or author in Oracle Analytics Cloud, you can select the best option for rendering content on dashboards for your users. This topic describes how dashboard content is rendered and the advantages of each option.

Consider an example of a dashboard that has multiple tabs, and each tab includes multiple visualizations. A dashboard construct has the following elements in it:

Dashboard structure (layout) including organization of tabs, visualizations layout on each tab, prompts, and filters
Information related to each visualization including subject areas, columns on the subject areas, and the visualization type (such as chart or table)

When a user opens a dashboard, the system starts to load the dashboard construct, determines where to place the tabs and visualizations, and runs the queries for each visualization as part of rendering the dashboard. You can decide whether users must wait for the dashboard metadata to load completely before any dashboard content is rendered.

Metadata generally loads quickly. For dashboards with many embedded objects (including conditions, dashboard prompts, and visualizations), the metadata can take some time to load and this can be sensitive to aspects of application design such as the availability and latency of the data source. As a result, the user might be waiting for the dashboard to render without any feedback and it might look like the dashboard is still loading or that the browser has stopped responding.

Administrator Controls

Administrators control how dashboards are rendered using the property Enable Immediate Dashboard Rendering in System Settings:

On: Specifies to render dashboard content immediately, even if some content is unavailable.
Off (default): Specifies to wait for all dashboard content to be loaded before rendering.

For more information, see Performance and Compatibility Options.

Author Controls

Authors can control how dashboards are rendered individually at the dashboard level using options on the Dashboard Properties dialog, available in the Tools drop-down list:

Render Content when Available (default): Specifies to display the dashboard content immediately, even if some content is unavailable.
Wait for All Content: Specifies to wait for all the dashboard content to load before displaying content.

When you specify to display dashboard content immediately, visualizations start to render and data is loaded when the respective dashboard elements are completed.