Design Dashboard-like Analytics Applications with Pivot Table

Volodymyr Yatsevsky posted on November 2nd, 2012

While Pivot Table can be used as a fully standalone web application for simple data analysis, it is also powerful pivot table component, which intention is to power up dashboard-like interfaces for more complex business intelligence suites. Whether you are thriving to build solid KPI reporting tool or power up social analytics application, you’d definitely come at the point where you are in a desperate need for crosstab reports instead of traditional tables.

Despite starting with Flexmonster Pivot is easy, one can get lost in a number of demos in our Demo Gallery, so we give a short bootstrap guide which configuration to start from.

1. Are you building Web App or Flex App? Depending on which you’re looking for, check for “Flex” tab in demos each time you visit Documentation section or Demo Gallery. Learn how the component should be embedded, including examples of embedding multiple instances of the component or using pivot table in pivot charts mode.
2. Decide which additional toolbar set to use. Our all-in-one demo provides most extensive controls you get to interface with pivot table. However, please note that the toolbar is NOT part of the component, so it’s up to you to modify it, remove buttons and fully support yourself. Also, in most cases, you’d need the component itself without any kind of toolbar.
3. Learn API functions which you’d need. Both Web and Flex versions of Pivot Table offer flexible and sophisticated API which would help you to tailor Pivot Table functions to the needs of your application. You can go with very basic interactivity, or extend controls for more sophisticated functionality.
   • See complete Documentation for Flex API v.1.7.
   • See complete Documentation for Web/Javascript API v.1.7.
4. Modify report configuration. Whether your analytical dashboard would contain single report or ability to switch over multiple reports, you might consider implementing preset reports user can start with. To learn over vast abilities of report configuration, visit Configuration Documentation.
5. Localize Pivot Table interface. For international users, you can enable single or multiple localizations, translating pivot table interface into the language you might require. This pivot table localization article would be of use for this purpose.
6. Refine Look and Feel. As part of final touch-ups you might also like to adjust pivot table colors to match the ones you like or the ones defined as product or corporate standard. Pivot’s unified styling model would help you to define just a single color to change complete styling of datagrid and dialog windows of pivot table.

Finalizing the deployment may involve repetitions of all or some of the mentioned steps, depending on which area should be additionally worked on. Good luck with implementations and stay tuned for tech hints and tricks for Flexmonster Pivot Table and Charts.