As the heart of your application, the dashboard page has to be as flexible as possible to accommodate to varying content needs. Widgets displaying all sorts of data will always be the bread and butter of any Ubidots application, but often times other types of content are critical to the operation and need a place of easy access, as is the case of the dashboard page.
That's where Dashboard Pages comes in: It gives you a way of tailoring your Ubidots experience even further by expanding the type of content that's displayed in a place as prominent as the dashboard.
Requirements
An Ubidots account with Industrial plan and onwards.
1. What Are Dashboard Pages
Dashboard Pages are a way of further customizing your Ubidots applications by defining the type of content that's displayed on any given dashboard on a granular level. While a default Ubidots dashboard can only be used to display widgets and their corresponding data, a Dashboard Page will display any content that you and your operation need.
By using a custom dashboard page, you can embed external pages for them to be displayed in your Ubidots dashboard. This could be anything, from a video that explains how to use the platform, all the way to a third-party application that's important to your operation.
Important note:
Currently, it's possible to use this feature to embed external pages, but in the near future even more complex and thorough customizations will be possible for Dashboard Pages.
2. Creating a Dashboard Page
The current scope of this feature allows you to embed external pages into your dashboard. Doing this requires only a few steps:
While in a dashboard, click on the hamburger button located in the upper left corner of the screen. On the pane that opens up, either create a new dashboard or edit an existing one.
Scroll down in the settings menu until you find the "dashboard type" option. Select the "custom" option in the drop-down menu that's next to this option.
Right below the "dashboard type" option, you'll see the "custom page URL" option, paste the URL of the page you want to embed there.
Configure other dashboard options to meet your requirements (such as its name) and when your done, click on the "save" button.
Important notes:
Some pages can't be embedded. This has nothing to do with Ubidots nor with the dashboard type feature, but with a restriction configured in those specific pages—this is the case of Google, for example.
Embedded pages can be interacted with. You can use available buttons and navigate freely through them.
Certain pages are embeddable and interactive except for their login portals. This means you won't be able to log in to that specific page through an Ubidots dashboard.
3. Developing Dashboard Pages
While it is useful to embed an external application inside a dashboard, this approach still requires you to develop and host your custom frontend externally.
We will soon launch a development center to enable you to code and host your own pages using HTML, JavaScript, and React. If you'd like to join the beta program for this new feature, please ping us at support@ubidots.com.