Building a Dashboard

Owned by Edward Barrier (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Dec 11, 2023
5 min read

 

First step - what data do you need to display?

In the first step, make sure you understand what it is your dashboard needs to display. This is easy enough normally since this may be provided. Here is an example.

You receive an email requesting a dashboard and attached is a document containing this:

  • List line #, pallets per hour, and average winder tubes per min ran in first box to left.  

  • Can size we’re running on that line in the size column.  

  • Pallets made indicating red, yellow, green highlights if they’re running budget based on recipe batch information for each hour. 

  • Total pallets made under total. 

  • To keep ongoing data for each shift A, B, C, & D shifts to be accumulated for month period or a predetermined timeframe that we can manually adjust in admin setting.

 

Now that the objective is defined, it is time to find where to get this information.

Second step - where do you get that data?

Simply put, the DOR. The DOR can interpret formulas fed to it and gather the requested data from the plc tables. To find what plc tables you should be feeding to the DOR you can check out the plcadmin page or just look at the tblPLC_PLCid table and look at the descriptions.

 

You may need more than one PLC table to get your data from, which is where constructing a formula comes in. You may consider at first building a spreadsheet as you gather this information and build the formulas. Here is some of the formulas used for the above example:

  • Size: R1;1,7001

  • Average winder tubes: m7334 / u46

  • Pallets per hour: m7005 * R2;1,7001 / R4;1,7001 / R3;1,7001 * 60

  • Actual pallets over time: ( ( d7285,10000000 + p7455 ) * m7601 + ( d8285,10000000 + p8455 ) * m7602 ) / m7448

If you don't yet have an understanding of how Recipes work and their syntax, here is a break down:

  • The R simply indicates it is a recipe.

  • The 1;1 could be replaced by these variables - <Category ID>;<Component ID>. To illustrate this further, the below screenshot points to 4;1

  • The last number indicates the PLCid table that contains the Recipe ID to lookup.

So R4;1,7001, which pointed to this recipe in this case, would return 255.

You might also look into existing dashboards as some may already have the information you are looking for and then you can use those already built formulas in your dashboard.

You can test the formulas at /DOR/adminpages/formulatester.aspx.

Third step - where do you build the dashboard?

To build the dashboard there are to pages you can navigate to. The first is /dor/adminpages/ReportAdmin.aspx and the other is /dor/adminpages/SimplifiedReportAdmin.aspx. The simplified page is better for the initial layout and the ReportAdmin page is better for inputting the formulas and information quickly, just be sure to save.

In this specific case we can use the simplified page to create the group and subgroups required and as well as the rows and columns in each subgroup. Here is the completed dashboard layout for one of the lines (keep in mind the cells have already been filled out):

Most of the fields are self-explanatory, however one thing to pay attention to in this example specifically is the PLC Data Source. PLC 7285’s track data interval is Real Time. When using the 'd' in the formula it is going to get the difference between the most recent and oldest value. So currently, because it tracks data in real time, it will get the difference of the two most recent values which, in this case, is always one. However, we want it to get the difference between the first and last values over the whole hour or month. To do this we can use PLC Data Source to change how the formula acts. PLC 441 is shift based, which will get the difference over the shift period. Using the Value Type field (see picture above or below for reference) set to ‘This X hour of the day’, it will filter the result, so it displays only the hour the dashboard wants to see. In summary, you can use PLC Data Source to override the default context for how data will be returned.

 

Using the Report admin, we can quickly fill any information:

 

Fourth step - how do you know the data is accurate?

To check that the data you are calculating is accurate, you can navigate to /Graphing/CreateEditGraph.aspx. You can break down your formula to get the data in base units and do the calculations yourself to verify.