There are many things to consider when creating a dashboard. How do you take a massive amount of information and visualize it in a way that helps your managers and executives make important decisions?
As a React developer, you may find that building dashboards is one of your more difficult responsibilities. NPM is full of charting and graphing libraries that might help you deliver a dashboard by your deadline. However, finding what you need by trial-and-error and is a huge time sink.
Fortunately, there’s a better way. When it comes to the enterprise-grade charting and graphing components that can help you create an awesome dashboard, Wijmo has you covered.
Creating an Enterprise Sales Dashboard
Let’s start with a definition. When we say dashboard, what exactly do we mean? Something like this:
This is what your manager has in mind when they ask you to quickly whip up a dashboard for them.
Now, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a developer and not a graphic designer. The question is: as developers, just how close to this lovely example of a dashboard can we get on our own?
Using Wijmo, it turns out we can get close. Very close.
Let’s take a look at the tools and widgets we’ll be using.
The Tools
These are the tools we’ll be using to construct our dashboard:
Bootstrap
In a world where we have Flexbox and CSS Grid, the programming pundits and self-styled experts on Reddit will tell you that you no longer need a CSS framework like Bootstrap. And they’re technically correct.
But Bootstrap makes it very easy to set up a responsive grid-based application and includes a bunch of extra niceties that will save us time. Since we’re developers with deadlines, we’re going to use Bootstrap.
When you’re making your own amazing dashboard, feel free to use Bootstrap, Bulma, Tachyons, or anything else that makes you happy.
This article will assume you’re familiar with Bootstrap basics, but you’ll be fine if you’ve never used it before. When you see CSS class names like col-sm-4, mt-1, and card, just keep in mind that those are part of Bootstrap’s CSS.
React
If you’re reading this article, you’re probably already familiar with React. But in case you aren’t it’s a wonderful JavaScript UI construction library created by Facebook.
It has taken the world by storm since it was released in 2013. It’s used everywhere, by companies large and small.
It has even branched out from the web, in the form of React Native. Using React Native, you can create great, fast mobile apps using React and JavaScript.
The rest of this article will assume you’re already familiar with basic React concepts, including purely functional components. If you’re not yet a React whiz, that’s okay! But you may need to refer to the React documentation if you run into any React-related bits of code you’re unsure of as we progress.
Wijmo
Wijmo is a terrific set of enterprise-ready JavaScript UI controls created by GrapeCity.
It’s a one-stop-shop for everything you’ll need to create amazing dashboards, reporting tools, and line-of-business apps that dazzle your managers, co-workers, and end users, leaving them amazed at how you’re able to get so much done so quickly.
Even better, Wijmo comes with built-in wrappers for React, Angular, and Vue. Since we’ll be building our dashboard with React, this is great news for us. Lots of charting libraries require us to use DOM refs and mess around for hours to get charts to work properly. With Wijmo, once we’ve imported the components we want to use, we can begin using them immediately.
The All-Star Lineup
There are a few specific Wijmo components we’re going to use to construct our dashboard. Since they’re going to be the stars of the show, let’s take a quick look at them before we dive into the code needed to create them.
FlexGrid
If you’ve got tabular data to display, but don’t want to drop it into a boring, ugly HTML table, Wijmo’s FlexGrid can help. The FlexGrid comes complete with automatic column generation, column sorting and reordering, editing, and clipboard support.
FlexChart
The FlexChart is a multi-talented magician that can display many types of charts: column, bar, scatter, line, area, and spline - as well as several combinations of these types at once!
We’re going to be using a FlexChart to add a great-looking bar chart to our dashboard.
FlexPie
Who do you call when you want to show the relative sizes of several categories of data? FlexPie, that’s who.
You can use the FlexPie anywhere you’d use an ordinary pie chart, but FlexPie has a few nice extras that help it stand out from the pie chart crowd.
RadialGauge
When a manager looks at a sales dashboard, they want to be able to see at a glance if this week’s sales are great, acceptable, or terrible. The RadialGauge gives us this ability and looks great while doing it!
The Code
To keep things nice and simple, we’re going to be using StackBlitz to host and run our dashboard. All of the code needed can be seen by clicking here. In a production app, you’d want to pull out all of your components into separate files. I’ve defined them all in index.js so you can take everything in quickly without having to jump around.
We’ll walk through all of the important sections of code one at a time, but we’re going to skip discussing boilerplate that’s not directly relevant to our app. Since we’re developers with deadlines, this article isn’t going to explore every possible configuration of the Wijmo components we’re using. If we tried to do that, every component would need its own article!
Instead, after we walk through the code for each component, I’ll show you where you can go to explore the component in more depth. Now, let’s get started!
After all of the imports at the top of index.js, you’ll see two purely functional components:
const ChartPanel = ({title, children}) => {
return (
<div className="col-lg-4 col-md-6 col-sm-12 mt-1">
<div className="card dashboardPanel">
<div className="card-body">
<h5 className="card-title">{title}</h5>
{children}
</div>
</div>
</div>
);
}
const DataPanel = ({title, children}) => {
return (
<div className="col-sm-12">
<div className="card dashboardRow">
<div className="card-body">
<h5 className="card-title">{title}</h5>
{children}
</div>
</div>
</div>
)
}
These are just wrappers that keep most of our Bootstrap-related boilerplate in one place. These will come in handy if you decide to customize the dashboard for your own needs and add additional panels because as you’re about to see, using these wrapper classes makes it very easy to create your own dashboard panels with Wijmo controls inside!
Next, we create a panel with a RadialGauge showing how much our company has sold today:
const Gauge = ({data}) => {
return (
<ChartPanel title="Today's Sales ($)">
<div className="gauge">
<RadialGauge
min={ 0 } max={ 500000 }
isReadOnly={ true }
thickness={0.15}
value={ data }
/>
</div>
</ChartPanel>
);
}
Our gauge component is simple: it takes the ChartPanel we defined above and wraps it around a Wijmo RadialGauge. We pass in a few props to customize it to our needs; we set minimum and maximum values that make sense for our dashboard, make the gauge read only, and set its thickness.
You’ll notice that our Gauge component takes one parameter named data and passes it to the RadialGauge’s value prop. This value should always be set to a number that represents the current value the gauge is set to. This number should always be between the gauge’s min and max properties.
We’ve only used a few of RadialGauge’s many options. For a more in-depth look at what it can do, take a look at the Wijmo Gauge 101 page.
Next, we’re going to add a bar chart that breaks down sales by country:
const SalesChart = ({salesData}) => {
return (
<ChartPanel title="Sales By Country">
<FlexChart itemsSource={salesData}
bindingX="country"
style={{ height: "290px" }}>
<FlexChartSeries name="Sales" binding="sales" />
</FlexChart>
</ChartPanel>
);
}
Just like we did with the gauge, we’re wrapping everything in our custom ChartPanel. Inside that, we’re adding a Wijmo FlexChart. You’ll notice we pass it a few props: itemsSource, bindingX, and style.
style is straightforward: it’s just an object full of CSS properties that get passed along to the Wijmo chart. In this case, we’re just setting the chart’s height to ensure it fits neatly inside our chart panel.
itemsSource, as its name implies, contains a list of data items that will be used to construct the chart. The prop should be passed a JavaScript array containing objects that have at least one string property for x-axis labels and one numeric property containing y-axis values FlexChart will use to draw the chart bars - or points, or lines, depending on which chart type you choose. In this case of our dashboard, the itemsSource for our chart looks like this:
const salesByCountry = [
{ country: "Canada", sales: 27250 },
{ country: "USA", sales: 107340},
{ country: "Germany", sales: 45360 },
{ country: "UK", sales: 66250}
]
Next, we see bindingX is set to “country”. This just tells Wijmo that as it goes through the itemsSource we provided and constructs the chart, it should use the country property of each object as the x-axis label for that data point.
Inside the FlexChart, you’ll notice a FlexChartSeries element. It receives two props: name and binding. name tells Wijmo what to label this data series in the chart legend, and binding tells Wijmo which property of each data item to use to render this data series.
Although we’re only using a single data series in our dashboard chart, FlexChart will happily render multiple data series on a single chart. For a deeper look at everything FlexChart can do for you, take a look at FlexChart 101.
const SalesPie = ({salesData}) => {
return (
<ChartPanel title="Sales by Salesperson">
<FlexPie itemsSource={salesData}
binding="sales"
bindingName="name"
innerRadius={0.70}
style={{ height: "290px" }}/>
</ChartPanel>
);
}
Next, we have FlexPie. Since FlexPie is a close cousin of FlexChart, it accepts a very similar set of props. There’s one important point of difference: FlexPie can only display a single data series, since multiple series on a pie chart wouldn’t make too much sense!
As a result, instead of adding a series separately, we provide the data binding property directly to FlexPie. Let’s take a look at all of the props we have used:
itemsSource works the same way as it does in FlexChart. You should pass it an array of JavaScript objects containing a string property to label the data point in the chart legend, and a numeric property that is used to render the pie wedge for the data point. The data our FlexPie is using looks like this:
export const salesByPerson = [
{ name: "Bill", sales: 5500},
{ name: "Ted", sales: 7250},
{ name: "Angela", sales: 8500},
{ name: "Jill", sales: 10750}
]
Next up, bindingName tells which property of each data object should be used to label the data point on the chart. In our case, we’re being to the name property.
binding tells Wijmo which property of each data object contains the numeric value it should use to calculate the of that data point’s pie wedge.
innerRadius is a fun one: if you set it to a value between 0 and 1, it will hollow out the center of the pie and turn your pie chart into a donut chart! Not that there’s anything wrong with plain old pie charts. They’re great! Turning our chart into a donut just gives it a hipster, 21st-century sort of look.
style works the same way it did for our FlexChart. We’re just adding it to make sure our donut chart fits neatly inside its dashboard box. For a deep dive into everything FlexPie can do for you, check out FlexPie 101.
Finally, let’s take a look at the table where we show a list of recent transactions. Instead of a boring old HTML table, we’re using a Wijmo FlexGrid:
const TransactionList = ({transactions}) => {
return (
<DataPanel title="Recent Transactions">
<FlexGrid style={{width: "100%"}}
itemsSource={transactions}>
<FlexGridColumn header="Client Name"
binding="client" width="2*" />
<FlexGridColumn header="Description"
binding="description" width="3*" />
<FlexGridColumn header="Total ($)"
binding="value" width="1*" />
<FlexGridColumn header="Quantity"
binding="itemCount" width="1*" />
</FlexGrid>
</DataPanel>
);
}
Wow! There’s a lot more going on here than in our previous components. Let’s break it down one piece at a time to see what’s going on.
First, we’re wrapping the grid in a DataPanel, one of our custom Bootstrap-ified container components.
Next, we create the FlexGrid. Notice that we pass it two props: style and itemsSource. We’ve seen both of these before, and they serve the same purpose here. One thing to note is that the shape of the data passed to itemsSource looks a bit different that what we’ve been seeing up to this point:
const recentSales = [
{ client: "Dunder Mifflin",
description: "Assorted paper-making supplies",
value: 4700, itemCount: 10},
{ client: "Utopia Planitia Shipyards",
description: "Dilithium, duranium, assorted shipbuilding supplies",
value: 21750, itemCount: 250}
];
As we see, we have an array of objects containing a mix of string and numeric properties. Each object property can be bound to a chart column. If you don’t manually specify any columns, FlexGrid will intelligently come up with a set of columns and column headings for you.
Since we want maximum control over the look of our data, you’ll notice that we’ve added several FlexGridColumns to our FlexGrid. We’re passing three props to each FlexGridColumn: header, binding, and width.
header tells Wijmo what header text to use to label this column.
binding tells Wijmo which property of each data object it should bind to this column. I’ve intentionally set it up so our column headings don’t completely match names of the properties in our data objects: for instance, our Quantity column is being bound to the itemCount data property.
I chose to do this because it’s extremely common to receive data from an API or back-end system containing data with labels that don’t make a lot of sense. Thanks to Wijmo giving you the ability to add custom column bindings, you won’t need to do a ton of data-preprocessing before handing your data off to Wijmo. Just tell Wijmo what to expect, and it’ll do all of the heavy lifting.
Finally, we’re passing each column a width prop. The widths we’re passing in might look a bit funny: they contain values like 2* and 3*. Star sizing is a powerful way to define dynamic sizing for FlexGrids. Wijmo’s documentation provides a great explanation of how this works, and how you can use it to ensure your data grids render exactly the way you’d like them to.
For a full look at FlexGrid’s capabilities, see FlexGrid 101.
Let’s finish up with a look at our final dashboard app component:
class App extends Component {
constructor() {
super();
this.state = {
recentSales: recentSales,
salesByCountry: salesByCountry,
salesByPerson: salesByPerson
};
}
calculateSales () {
let totalSales = 0;
this.state.recentSales.forEach(sale => totalSales += sale.value);
return totalSales;
}
render() {
return (
<>
<NavBar title="Sales Dashboard" />
<div className="container">
<div className="row">
<Gauge data={ this.calculateSales() } />
<SalesChart salesData={this.state.salesByCountry} />
<SalesPie salesData={this.state.salesByPerson} />
</div>
<div className="row">
<TransactionList transactions={this.state.recentSales} />
</div>
</div>
</>
);
}
}
Since we’ve wrapped our custom code in its own components, our App component is 100% standard React. We import our dummy data and use it to set our initial app state, add a method to dynamically calculate to sales figure for our radial gauge, and then we render all of our custom components. Nice and simple!
The Result
After going through all of that code, it’s time for us to see the end result! You can see it running live on StackBlitz: https://stackblitz.com/edit/react-wijmo-salesdash-udsdv7. The net result is a dashboard that looks like this:
Not bad! We’re developers working all by ourselves, and we’ve managed to quickly assemble a dashboard that looks pretty darn good! And thanks to Bootstrap’s responsive CSS, it looks great on mobile, too:
And this is just the beginning. Why not start with the code we’ve built here, and use it as the foundation for your own dazzling Wijmo dashboard?
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, you can use Wijmo components to create a production-ready dashboard quickly and easily. Just think of how much time you’d spend trying to create your own grid view with built-in sorting and filtering.
Wijmo’s components help you innovate by giving you the tools to create great looking enterprise dashboards right away - no need to spend hours trying to cobble together open-source toolkits or rolling your own solutions.
With that in mind, remember that the dashboard we’ve created is just a starting point. A single article doesn’t give us nearly enough space to explore the entire Wijmo toolset; we’ve just scratched the surface of what Wijmo can do for you. To get a better idea of what Wijmo can help you accomplish, start by reading about all of Wijmo’s controls, and then see the controls live in the Wijmo Component Explorer.
