Dashboard API

Tivoli BigFix exposes an interface that allows you to author your own dashboards, granting you the power to create customized views into whatever aspect of your network you want to monitor. Dashboards, wizards and Web Reports are three different manifestations of the same underlying concept. The main differences are:

  • Dashboards Typically open in a document window and provide for easily updated views. They usually consist of a collection of tabular and graphical widgets that provide a condensed view of your network.
  • Wizards Typically open in a stand-alone dialog window. They often have multiple pages to ease the user through a complicated installation or procedure. Both wizards and dashboards have the file extension of OJO.
  • Web Reports Are similar to dashboards, but offer static web-facing views of your data. They have a file extension of BESWRPT.

Despite these differences, the interfaces are driven by the same fundamental language elements, referred to as the Dashboard API. This guide describes how Relevance elements work within the Dashboard API, letting you analyze, aggregate, and visualize multiple facets of your networked clients.

The Dashboard API is based on HTML and XML. The XML defines hooks into the console or Web Reports and it has a single primary section that holds HTML. The HTML section in turn can hold anything that a browser can render. In addition to the basic browser environment, the console or the Web Reports application injects a library of JavaScript hooks that provide access to various API functions.

The content that is embedded in the HTML section is typically a mix of JavaScript, HTML, Flex, and Relevance expressions that are evaluated with the JavaScript function EvaluateRelevance. As soon as they are received, the results of the evaluation are embedded directly into the page and it is redrawn.

The document can also specify how your dashboard is attached to the console UI, for example as a menu, a list, or an item on the navigation bar. Dashboard documents can also be linked to or from other documents. They can be imported or exported and used by internal or external Fixlet sites.