As the hub of your IoT operation, the dashboard is the place from which you keep track of your monitoring target. Depending on your needs, you can create either static or dynamic dashboards. The latter is an ideal option to centralize the visualization of many devices that have at least one variable label in common.
That way, hundreds of devices that record ambient conditions, for example, can be monitored from a single dashboard that allows you to choose which device(s) will “paint”, with their data, the widgets in that dashboard at any given time.
In this article we’ll go through the characteristics of dynamic dashboards, how to create one, and how static and dynamic widgets behave on them.
Requirements
An active Ubidots account.
1. Characteristics of Dynamic Dashboards
Dynamic dashboards have 3 characteristics that differentiate them from their static counterparts:
1. They have an extra button to choose the device or devices whose data will be displayed on the widgets at that moment.
Dynamic dashboards have one extra button on their navbar that shows a dropdown list with all the devices that are linked to the dashboard. By choosing a device here, the data displayed on the widgets will change accordingly. On single-device dashboards you’ll only be able to choose one device at a time, whereas multi-device dashboards let you choose more than one.
2. They’re linked to many devices.
Instead of having widgets that are tied to the variables of only one device (as is the case with static dashboards), when you create a dynamic dashboard you link it to a set of devices through which you can then shuffle, at any time, to determine whose data will be displayed on the widgets. The set of devices you choose in the dashboard’s settings are the ones you’ll see at the dropdown list of the navbar.
The set of devices you can choose are the following:
All devices: The list of all the existing devices of the account.
Device Group: Only the devices that belong to the selected Device Group.
Device Type: The devices that belong to the selected Device Type.
Note: The devices which users ultimately see will depend on their given roles and/or the organizations they belong to.
3. Multiple devices can be selected simultaneously so that their aggregated data is displayed on the widgets.
For accounts that hold Enterprise plans, one of the available options at the time of configuring a dynamic dashboard is to decide whether it will work based on one or on multiple devices.
Single-device dashboards only display the data of the device that’s selected in the dropdown list of the navbar.
Multi-device dashboards can display data of, as the name implies, multiple devices at the same time (up to 12). Depending on the type of widget (i.e., metric, chart, table, map, etc.) and its configuration, the way the data is represented will vary.
2. Creating a dynamic dashboard
For a more detailed guide on how to create a dashboard and configure both its settings as well as its appearance, head to this guide.
While on the dashboard-creation modal, select the option “Dynamic (Single Device)” in the Dynamic Dashboard dropdown.
Device list: Select the set of devices that will be linked to the dashboard and that will appear on the dropdown list of the navbar.
Default device: Select the first device to be prioritized on the dashboard.
Device display name: Choose how your devices will be represented in the dropdown list of the navbar:
By their name.
Their API label.
Or their descriptions.
Tags: use them as custom identifiers to organize your dashboards or to determine if your end users get to see or interact with a specific dashboard in your app by creating tag matches between them.
3. Explaining Static and Dynamic Widgets
Dynamic dashboards allow you to combine static and dynamic widgets at will. Using an ambient conditions monitoring operation with thousands of devices as an example, imagine they have a variable with the aggregated temperature across all of their devices.
If they wanted this variable to be always displayed on the dashboard, regardless of the device that’s currently selected on the dashboard’s navbar, then they would have to create a static widget linked to that variable.
On the other hand, they’ll be able to reuse all their dynamic widgets, seeing different data on them as they shuffle through their devices, by using the device dropdown list in the dashboard navbar.
To better understand the difference between static and dynamic widgets, here’s a table explaining their behavior:
| Static widget | Dynamic widget |
Dynamic dashboard |
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