Reveal supports dashboard linking, which is triggered when a visualization’s grid row or chart column/bar is selected. This features takes the concept of drill down navigation to a new level; for instance, if you want to provide more details on the information displayed in a visualization, you can use a whole new dashboard to do so. This can be very useful to establish top-down analysis paths, where you go from a high level overview of the reality of a business to more detailed views with the specifics. One example is the implementation of a Company 360, which provides key performance indicators for each area. Once you select on any visualizations to maximize it, Reveal opens another dashboard with more details for all projects.
It’s possible to associate actions to specific events. Opening another dashboard is one of two supported actions. The second one is opening a URL. This enables extensibility scenarios such as interacting with third-party web applications as part of the dashboard navigation. You can add links through the Settings section of the Visualizations Editor, under Links.
The control in the Links section selects the event or trigger that will be used to fire the action. Possible options are:
Value is Selected: The event is triggered whenever a user selects a row in a grid view. In other visualizations, such as charts, it is triggered whenever you select a data item of the chart. This might include columns, bar, pie slices, or other elements that depend on the chart type used in your visualization.
Visualization is Maximized. This event is triggered whenever a visualization is maximized in the dashboard view.
You can have more than one action per event. The possible actions when an event is fired are:
Open Dashboard. Enabling will open another dashboard when the event takes place. If the selected dashboard happens to have dashboard filters, you will need to configure how to populate them for each dashboard filter. You will need to configure two parameters:
The Dashboard that will be opened once the event is triggered.
The Display Link, which is the title the users will see if they select the grid row or chart element.
If your target dashboard has existing Dashboard Filters, you can also configure how to get the required value from one of the dashboard filters in your current dashboard.
Open URL. Enabling this action will open the configured URL in your device’s browser. There are two parameters that you need to define:
The URL the visualization will point to, which users will be redirected to once a chart element or table row is selected.
The Display Link, which is the title the users will see if they select the grid row or chart element.
For URLs, you can also include Variables, which will dynamically construct the URL the user will be linked to based on the values in your visualization fields. For example, let’s take a look at the following visualization link:
The URL has been set to http://www.countryreports.org/travel, and the selected Variable will be Countries. Therefore, users who select the View Country Reports link in the visualization will be directed to:
http://www.countryreports.org/country/[Country Name].htm
Where [Country Name] will vary depending on the values in the Countries field.
