Enhanced Dashboard

I have watched your video on the enhanced dashboard and I love it, but struggling to figure out how to implement it for my app. I have some key differences from the video scenario (unless there is more than one video that I missed). Your video showed actual filtered results based on the user. I am trying to get a dashboard that will show stats for different values that only an admin can access. In other words, instead of listing out each transaction that was completed meeting my filters, I just want to know how many for each category. No filter would count (or sum depending on the column) but if I use a filter, it would only count or sum those that met the filtered criteria. Is there a video already out there that would show me something along these lines or how can I go about figuring this out. I just can’t seem to figure it out.

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Hey @Bradiskey

I think I explored this in one of the Friday livestreams - which means the insights and answers are buried inside the hour-long video (making them mostly inaccessible). :frowning:

The difficulty with building out something like this is that AppSheet needs a “thing” in order to do something; so in order to display some totals, AppSheet needs a “thing” to use to display the value. So you need a record somewhere where you can display the value.

Sometimes you might have a record where these values could be stored

  • Like if you were trying to show the total of an order - you can put the value on the order

But other times (like you’re describing) the value is more of a summary value, and there isn’t a direct record in which to display the value.

In situations like this, you need to have something that you can use to display what you need.

  • One solution is to build virtual columns on the User table
    • These then dynamically build out whatever values you need
    • Downside is that the system does these calculations for each record in the table
      • and if you have a lot of records, or the calcs are heavy, this can have a negative impact on the app’s performance.
  • Another solution is to create a table where you can create a record for this purpose.
    • Make a dedicated table and create a record in the table with 1 column (id column, because every table needs an id). Then in the App, you can use this record to then show the dynamic values you need.
    • This table could be the Welcome table (if you use it), as it’s only got one record
    • You could build a dedicated table for this: Admin_Dash_Summary

The root of the issue is that AppSheet needs a “thing” in order to do something; right now you don’t have that thing, so you’re struggling - but once you do it will make things much easier.