Building an interactive dashboard
Typical management dashboards provide a set of business metrics and a level of filtering operation to allow users to drill into the set of metrics. This section of the chapter will use the Dashboard example provided earlier to demonstrate the configuring of a Drop Down control to filter the data displayed on the dashboard. The following screenshot is the Total Sales Dashboard with the Drop Down control added in the upper-right of the dashboard:
Notice the drop-down box is currently populated with the All Product Categories item. The items in the Drop Down can be manually populated through the Values tab of the Drop Down properties. However, scripts can also be used to populate the control from a list of items from a dataset in the document.
Populating Drop Downs with a script
The safest way to create an object that will be used to filter data in a dataset is to make sure the values set in the Drop Down match the values in the column of the dataset that...
