Dashing, the exceptionally handsome dashboard framework

March 1, 2016 Spiros Glykas

Introduction

Dashing is a Sinatra based framework that lets you build beautiful dashboards.

Check out a demo over here. Here's another one, optimized for 1080p screens.

Key features:

Use premade widgets, or fully create your own with scss, html, and coffeescript.
Widgets harness the power of data bindings to keep things DRY and simple. Powered by batman.js.
Use the API to push data to your dashboards, or make use of a simple ruby DSL for fetching data.
Drag & Drop interface for re-arranging your widgets.
Host your dashboards on Heroku in less than 30 seconds.

This project was created at Shopify for displaying custom dashboards on TVs around the office.

Getting Started

Install the gem from the command line. Make sure you have Ruby 1.9+
$ gem install dashing
Generate a new project
$ dashing new sweet_dashboard_project
Change your directory to sweet_dashboard_project and bundle gems
$ bundle
Start the server!
$ dashing start
Point your browser at localhost:3030 and have fun!

Every new Dashing project comes with sample widgets & sample dashboards for you to explore. The directory is setup as follows:

Assets — All your images, fonts, and js/coffeescript libraries. Uses Sprockets
Dashboards — One .erb file for each dashboard that contains the layout for the widgets.
Jobs — Your ruby jobs for fetching data (e.g for calling third party APIs like twitter).
Lib — Optional ruby files to help out your jobs.
Public — Static files that you want to serve. A good place for a favicon or a custom 404 page.
Widgets — All the html/css/coffee for individual widgets.

Run dashing from command line to find out what command line tools are available to you.

Example Dashboard

Here's a sample dashboard with 2 widgets. With a name of sample.erb, it becomes accessible at /sample.

<% content_for(:title) { "My super sweet dashboard" } %>

<ul>

</li>

</li>

</ul>

</div>

view raw sample.erb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Each widget is represented by a div element needing data-id and data-view attributes. The wrapping <li>tags are used for layout.

data-id: Sets the widget ID which will be used when pushing data to the widget. Two widgets can have the same widget id, allowing you to have the same widget in multiple dashboards. Push data to that id, and each instance will be updated.

data-view: Specifies the type of widget that will be used.

Both these widgets are of the same type: Number. However, using different data- attributes lets you customize them. You can use any arbitrary attribute you want — each one will be available for you within the widget logic.

Anatomy of a widget

an HTML file used for layout and bindings
a SCSS file for styles
a coffeescript file which allows you to handle incoming data & functionality

Number widget's HTML:

</p>

view raw number.html hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Widgets use batman bindings in order to update their contents. Whenever the data changes, the DOM will automatically reflect the changes.

You may notice the piping '|' characters in some of the data-bind's above. These are Batman Filters, and let you easily format the representation of data.

Number widget's Coffeescript:

class Dashing.Number extends Dashing.Widget

ready: ->

# This is fired when the widget is done being rendered

onData: (data) ->

# Fired when you receive data

# You could do something like have the widget flash each time data comes in by doing:

# $(@node).fadeOut().fadeIn()

# Any attribute that has the 'Dashing.AnimatedValue' will cause the number to animate when it changes.

@accessor 'current', Dashing.AnimatedValue

# Calculates the % difference between current & last values.

@accessor 'difference', ->

if @get('last')

last = parseInt(@get('last'))

current = parseInt(@get('current'))

if last != 0

diff = Math.abs(Math.round((current - last) / last * 100))

"#{diff}%"

else

# Picks the direction of the arrow based on whether the current value is higher or lower than the last

@accessor 'arrow', ->

if @get('last')

if parseInt(@get('current')) > parseInt(@get('last')) then 'icon-arrow-up' else 'icon-arrow-down'

view raw number.coffee hosted with ❤ by GitHub

By default, whenever a widget receives JSON data, it mixes in the received data onto itself. This means that if you pass in data with atitle attribute, the widget's title variable will change, and so will all DOM elements bound to it. No need to handle that yourself.

Laying out the widgets

Dashing uses gridster.js to create a layout for your widgets. Each widget is part of an unordered list. The <li> element for a widget contains:

data-row : What row the widget is on.
data-col : What column the widget is on
data-sizex : Integer size for the width of a widget
data-sizey : Integer size for the height of a widget

For both data-row and data-col, you can leave them as 1, and gridster will automatically position your widgets.

If you want to customize the layout easily, simply navigate to your running dashboard, and drag the widgets with your mouse. You will be prompted to save the layout when you're finished. Follow the on-screen instructions.

For data-sizex and data-sizey, these are multiples of the widget dimensions you can configure in application.coffee

Dashing.on 'ready', ->

Dashing.widget_margins ||= [5, 5]

Dashing.widget_base_dimensions ||= [300, 360]

Dashing.numColumns ||= 4

view raw application.coffee hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Getting Data Into Your Widgets

Providing data to widgets is easy. You specify which widget you want using a widget id, and then pass in the JSON data. There are two ways to do this:

Jobs

Dashing uses rufus-scheduler to schedule jobs. You can make a new job with dashing generate job sample_job, which will create a file in the jobs directory called sample_job.rb.

Example

# :first_in sets how long it takes before the job is first run. In this case, it is run immediately

SCHEDULER.every '1m', :first_in => 0 do |job|

send_event('karma', { current: rand(1000) })

end

view raw sample_job.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This job will run every minute, and will send a random number to ALL widgets that have data-id set to 'karma'.

You send data using the following method:

send_event(widget_id, json_formatted_data)

Jobs are where you put stuff such as fetching metrics from a database, or calling a third party API like Twitter. Since the data fetch is happening in only one place, it means that all instances of widgets are in sync. Server Sent Events are used in order to stream data to the dashboards.

Note that if you modify a job then Dashing needs to be restarted to pick up the changes.

API

Your widgets can be updated directly over HTTP. Post the data you want in json to /widgets/widget_id. For security, you will also have to include your auth_token (which can be found in config.ru).

Example

curl -d '{ "auth_token": "YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN", "current": 100 }' http://localhost:3030/widgets/karma

view raw push.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

HTTParty.post('http://localhost:3030/widgets/karma',

:body => { auth_token: "YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN", current: 1000 }.to_json)

view raw push.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

You can also perform dashboard-level actions by posting to /dashboards/dashboard_id. Currently there is a single event available,reload, that will refresh the target dashboard in the browser.

Example

curl -i -d '{ "auth_token": "YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN", "event": "reload"}' http://localhost:3030/dashboards/sample

view raw curl.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

If you want an event to target every dashboard, use a wildcard (*).

Example

curl -i -d '{ "auth_token": "YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN", "event": "reload"}' http://localhost:3030/dashboards/*

view raw curl2.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Additional Resources

Check out the wiki for interesting tips such as hosting on Heroku, or adding authentication.

Be sure to look at the list of third party widgets.

Browser Compatibility

Tested in Chrome, Safari 6+, and Firefox 15+.

Does not work in Internet Explorer because it relies on Server Sent Events.

Authors & Maintainers

Contributors

See contributors on GitHub

All contributions are more than welcome; especially new widgets!

License

Dashing is released under the MIT license

Source: http://dashing.io/

Introduction

Getting Started

Example Dashboard

Getting Data Into Your Widgets

Additional Resources

Browser Compatibility

Authors & Maintainers

Contributors

License

IT PROFESSIONALS ACTING FOR BUSINESSES