Chapter 4. Creating a custom dashboard widget

In order to create custom dashboards, users must combine some of the features of the Business Central (like data sets, pages, navigation trees, and permissions) together and publish them. Dashboards are pages containing at least one reporting component.

There are four stages in the creation of a custom dashboard:

  • Data set authoring - In this stage, you define a data set for accessing the data and displaying it through the pages. For more information, see Adding data sets.
  • Page authoring - In this stage, you create the pages which are used to display the data from the data sets, among other things. For more information, see Creating pages.
  • Publication - In this stage, navigation between pages are defined when you create the custom navigation trees or modify the existing default one (Workbench tree). For more information, see Creating a navigation tree or Editing a navigation tree.
  • Security management - In this stage, role and group permissions are set which defines the privileges a user enjoys when working on Business Central. For more information, see Security management.
Note

You will have to follow the stages listed above if you plan on migrating your dashboards from previous versions of Business Central to the latest one. Note that there is no automatic migration path or tooling to assist you in that regard. You must recreate all your dashboards from scratch.