Graph Widget
The Graph widget charts a saved query, so a question you worked out once keeps answering itself.
Configuring it
- Choose the saved query the widget should run.
- Choose how to group and measure it — the same decisions as aggregation.
- Choose the chart type.
- Name the widget for what it answers.
If the query does not yet exist, build and check it first. A widget is a poor place to debug a query, because a wrong result and an empty result look much the same in a small chart.
Use a relative period
This is the setting that most often goes wrong. A query fixed to particular dates will show those dates forever, so a dashboard that looked right when built quietly becomes a historical record.
Use a relative period — the last 24 hours, the last 7 days — so the widget keeps answering "recently" rather than one particular week. See Date and Time Ranges.
Choosing a grouping that reads
The same rule as aggregation: group by a field with a manageable number of distinct values. Twelve bars is a chart; two hundred is a smear.
Time is usually the best grouping for a dashboard, because a trend is what you want to notice at a glance. Pick a granularity matching the period — hourly over a day, daily over a month.
Reading it on a dashboard
A Graph widget earns its place when its normal shape is familiar, so an abnormal one is obvious. That is the real value: you are not reading figures, you are noticing that today does not look like yesterday.
Drilling in
Click a bar, or a point on a line, and you land in the owning module's grid, scoped to that series' saved query and to the time bucket you clicked — the same movement as drill-down from an aggregate, and the reason a dashboard is a starting point rather than a summary.
A mark you can drill into shows a pointer and highlights under the cursor. Where the chart draws something the client cannot resolve back to a module — a query whose module you no longer have, for instance — the mark stays inert rather than leading somewhere unhelpful. That is the quickest way to tell the two apart: if it does not light up, there is nothing behind it to open.
When to use something else
| Instead | When |
|---|---|
| Breakdown | You want proportions rather than a trend |
| Event History | You want the events themselves, not a total |
| Ace Chart | You discovered it in conversation and want to keep watching it |
Audit record
What eConnect writes to the audit trail for the actions on this page.
DASHBOARD CONFIGURE WIDGET '{name}' SAVED