PerformancePoint’s Most Versatile Report Type: the Web page!
Blogger friend Nick Barclay has written a great post about this topic at his blog. The ability to import a Web page into the dashboard to supplement other report types as well as the scorecard is a great way to express important metrics in ways that you might not be able to do in Dashboard Designer. If you can make that Web page dynamic, even better. Nick shows you how:
Creating Dynamic Web Page Reports
“As a follow up to my post on debugging filter links with web page reports I thought it would be worthwhile to put together a quick example to illustrate just what an unsung hero the web page report type is. Just think of the web page report as the catch-all report type. Basically, if you can't do it with one of the many pre-baked M&A report types then the web page report is what you want.
In the debugging filter links post we saw how dashboard items communicate with each other by embedding data in the Request.Params collection. In that example we simply displayed the contents of this collection. The next logical step is to actually do something with those contextual values we are passing to the report item at runtime. Remember that all the web page report does is send the user to a static URL, the dynamic part comes from two places:
- the incoming filter links configured on the report item embedded in the dashboard
- what is done with this filter link data by the code contained in the page we send the user to
Web page reports pretty much opens up the entire .NET framework to us, the possibilities are virtually limitless.
For example, let's imagine (in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances) that our users want a dashboard page that will allow them to select which search engine they wish to use. They wish to select their search engine of choice using a dropdown. the home page of the search engine name they select will appear in the dashboard and they can then search to their hearts content.”
Read the full blog post here.