Written by
Oana Elena Florea
, Customer Support Manager
A well-designed business dashboard is a remarkable information management tool. It will cut down complex processes into workable chunks of information so you can focus on the day to day operation of the business. Whether it's an operational or an analytical dashboard, building one in XWiki is quite simple.
Creating a dashboard in XWiki enables users to better visualize and analyze the wiki content in real-time. The best macros used inside gadgets allow easy display of Office documents (Office Document Viewer), efficient management of pages (Children, Pages), or improved data visualization (Gallery, Chart).
Office Document Viewer
The macro offers a view for Office attachments inside the gadget without downloading or importing them. It supports formats like doc, ppt, xls, odt, odp, ods, and the data is displayed using an Office Server.
For example, an Excel document can be stored as an attachment on a wiki page and displayed directly on the Dashboard.
Children
The Children macro displays a tree of children pages of the current page.
Chart
Chart displays a graphical chart generated from miscellaneous data sources. The chart data can be stored either inline inside the macro content or on a dedicated wiki page. The example below uses inline content inside the gadget macro.
Pages
The macro displays an index for easy filtering of the pages created in a specific space or the pages from the entire wiki. It includes many customization options like displaying action buttons (copy, rename, delete), specified columns, or the possibility to only list pages found in the passed space.
Gallery Macro
The Gallery Macro helps group and display images using a slide-show view. How to add the macro on the wiki Dashboard:
- Click on “Add Gadget”
- Search for “gallery” and click on “Select”
- Add the images for the slide-show inside the “Content” field and click “Submit”
The custom XWiki Dashboard below was built using Gallery, Office Document Viewer, Children, Pages, and the Chart macros inside gadgets.
Whether you want to get more value out of your data, make sure all your departments are on the same page, or plan to consolidate your business knowledge through multiple data points, building a Dashboard in XWiki is the place to start.
What other macros would you use to build your Custom Dashboard? Choose from our extensive list, or go even further with extensions, plugins, skins, themes, and many more.
General FAQ
How to create a new macro in XWiki for the Dashboard?
Macros are useful to create reusable and distributable functionality. You can create macros in XWiki either directly in a wiki page or in Java.
How can I find the complete list of macros in XWiki?
The XWiki Help Application includes a dedicated section for Macros including examples. You can also take a look at the Syntax Help or navigate to the XWiki.XWikiSyntaxMacrosList page on your wiki.
