Dashboards

Last update: March 5, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • Admin

When using AEM, you can manage numerous content of different types (for example, pages, assets). AEM Dashboards provide an easy to use and customizable way to define pages that displays consolidated data.

NOTE
AEM Dashboards are created on a per user basis, so a user can only access to their own dashboard.
However, Dashboard templates can be used to share common configuration and Dashboard layout.

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Administering Dashboards

Creating A Dashboard

  1. In the Tools section, click Configuration Console.
  2. In the tree, Double-Click Dashboard.
  3. Click New Dashboard.
  4. Type the Title (for example, My Dashboard) and the Name.
  5. Click Create.

Cloning A Dashboard

You may want to have multiple dashboards to quickly see information about your content from different views. To help you to create new Dashboard, AEM provides a clone feature that you can use to duplicate an existing Dashboard. To clone a Dashboard, proceed as follows:

  1. In the Tools section, click Configuration Console.

  2. In the tree, Click Dashboard.

  3. Click on the dashboard you want to clone.

  4. Click Clone.

  5. Type the Name of your new dashboard.

Removing A Dashboard

  1. In the Tools section, click Configuration Console.

  2. In the tree, Click Dashboard.

  3. Click on the dashboard you want to delete.

  4. Click Remove.

  5. Click Yes to confirm.

Dashboard Components

Overview

Dashboard components are nothing more than regular AEM components. This section describes reporting components shipped with AEM.

Web Analytics Reporting Components

AEM ships with a set of components that render multiple metrics of your SiteCatalyst data. Those components are listed in the Sidekick under the Dashboard section.

Each reporting component provides at least three tabs:

  • Basic: contains the main configuration.

  • Report: contains the configuration specific of each report.

  • Style: contains styling configuration like chart size and margin.

The reporting components are initialized with a default configuration that helps you to quickly set up your dashboard.

Basic configuration

The Basic tab provides access to the following configuration entries:

Title The title displayed on the dashboard.

Request type The way data are requested.

SiteCatalyst Configuration (optional) The configuration you want to use to connect to SiteCatalyst. If not provided the configuration is assumed to be configured on the Dashboard page (via page properties).

Report Suite ID (optional) The SiteCatalyst report suite you want to use to generate the graph.

Report configuration

To display web statistics, you need to define the date range of the data you want to fecth. The Report tab provides two fields to define that range.

NOTE
Setting a large date range can decrease the responsiveness of the dashboard.

Date From Absolute or relative date from which the data is fetched.

Date To Absolute or relative date to which the data is fetched.

Each component also defines specific settings.

Overtime Report

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Date Granularity Time unit of the X axis (for example, day, hour).

Metrics The list of events you want to display.

Elements The list of elements that breaks down the metrics data in the graph.

Ranked List Report

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Elements The element that breaks down the metrics data in the graph.

Metrics The event you want to display.

No. of top items Number of items displayed by the report.

Ranked Report

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Metrics The event you want to display.

Elements The element that breaks down the metrics data in the graph.

Top Site Section Report

This component displays a graph showing the more visited section of a website according to the following configuration.

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No. of top items Number of section displayed by in the report.

Trended Report

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Date Granularity Time unit of the X axis (for example, day, hour).

Metrics The event you want to display.

Elements The element that breaks down the metrics data in the graph.

Extending Dashboard

Overview

Dashboards are normal pages ( cq:Page), therefore any components can be used to assemble Dashboards.

There is a default component group Dashboard containing analytics reporting components which are enabled on the template by default.

Creating A Dashboard Template

A template defines the default content of a new Dashboard. You may use several templates for creating different types of dashboards.

Dashboard templates are created like other page templates, except that they are stored under /libs/cq/dashboards/templates/. See the Creating Contentpage Template section.

NOTE
Dashboard templates are shared between users.

Developing a Dashboard component

Developing a Dashboard component consists of creating a regular AEM Component. This section describes an example of a component that displays the top 10 of contributors.

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The top author components is stored in the repository at /apps/geometrixx-outdoors/components/reporting and is composed of :

  1. a jsp file that reads jcr data and defines the html placeholder.

  2. a client-side library containing one js file that fetches and orders the data, then fills the html placeholder.

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The following JavaScript file is defined in the geout.reporting.topauthors Client Library as a child of the component itself.

The QueryBuilder is used to query the repository to read cq:AuditEvent nodes. The query result is a JSON object from which author contributions are extracted.