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 be loaded completely before any dashboard content is rendered.

The loading of metadata generally happens quickly. For dashboards with many embedded objects (including conditions, dashboard prompts, and visualizations), the loading can take some time and 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 is hung.

Administrators control how dashboards are rendered using the system-level property called Enable Immediate Dashboard Rendering:

• 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 (the behavior in earlier releases of Oracle Analytics Cloud.

Description of the illustration ceal_dashboard_rendering_system_setting.jpg

For more information, see Performance and Compatibility Options.

Authors can control how dashboards are rendered individually at the dashboard level using options on the Dashboard Properties dialog:

• Render Content when Available (default) - Specifies to display dashboard content immediately, even if some content is unavailable.
• Wait for All Content - Specifies to wait for all dashboard content to load before displaying content. This also is the case for earlier releases of Oracle Analytics Cloud.

Description of the illustration ceal_dashboard_properties_render.jpg

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

Description of the illustration ceal_dashboard_rendered_content.jpg