Users of a dashboard might need to dive into a more detailed view of a device provided by another dashboard, or move on another dashboard that is at the higher level of hierarchy. What is needed therefore is a mechanism (perhaps a “navigation-bar” widget) that allows users to view what dashboards can be reached and/or open them (in running mode). This widget can be put in any place of a dashboard, and in multiple instances. It can be a single area (a label, an image) that is clickable. It could also be a combo-box from which one among several existing dashboards can be opened.

See for example what the Grafana editor allows users to do. Dashboards can be moved into (conceptual) folders, and the user can view the folders, open them, and launch any of those dashboards. And this is a widget that can be itself placed into a dashboard.

NOTE: to simplify the implementation, the "navigation bar" widget could be configured with a manually predefined list of dashboards.

Acceptance criteria

• the dashboard designer can place 1+ instances of the navigation widget in a dashboard;
• the 2 or more widgets are independent from each other;
• the current dashboard should not be listed;
• when running a dashboard that contains the navigation widget, Webjive should check if those dashboards referred to in the widget do exist; if not a warning message should be shown to the user in some way; this includes dashboards to which the current user has no access rights;
• when running a dashboard that contains the navigation widget, Webjive should check if there are new dashboards that have to be linked (sort of dashboard discovery at runtime) with some default properties (like the name of the dashboard as text link)
• these are some of the options we discussed and should be decided after some mocks are implemented and evaluated:
  • the configuration of the widget should enable the user to choose whether: how many links to show simultaneously, if the widget shows a dropdown menu to select a link, or all the links are shown (perhaps with a scrollbar - like grafana), if there is some CSS rule to associate to the widget itself (like background/fg colors, font properties), if dynamic discovery of dashboard is allowed;
  • each link in the widget should let the user specify if the linked dashboard should open on a new browser window/tab, if there is a text or image to use as link text, if the dashboard to be open is opened in run mode or edit mode, if there is some CSS rule to associate to a link.