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Building Dashboards

Dashboard & Canvas Editor

Your dashboard is a fixed-resolution canvas you build once in Design Mode and then publish. The same canvas renders identically in Design Mode, local view mode, and the Remote Web Dashboard.

The canvas

When you first open the editor, you'll name your dashboard and pick a resolution — a common preset (default 1920×1080) or a custom size. When your dashboard is shown on a screen smaller or larger than that resolution, it scales down uniformly (letterboxed, never stretched or cropped) to fit.

Design Mode

Design Mode is an Office-style ribbon editor. Add widgets by dragging one from the palette on the left — grouped into Numeric, Charts, Multi-input, Boolean/Discrete, String, General, and Design — onto the canvas, or by clicking a palette icon to drop it in a default spot.

  • Widgets snap to a 10px grid as you drag them.
  • Drag a widget's bottom-right handle to resize it.
  • Shift-click to select multiple widgets, then use align/distribute (left, center, right / top, middle, bottom) to line them up.
  • A contextual ribbon — WIDGET, FORMAT, ARRANGE, STATES tabs — edits the selected widget's label, bound input(s), min/max, colors, decimals, prefix/suffix, and more, depending on the widget type.

Binding widgets to data

Widgets don't talk to your PLC or database directly — they bind to an Input, which you configure separately (see Data Inputs & Connectors). In the WIDGET tab, pick a previously-configured input from a dropdown:

  • Most widgets bind to one input.
  • A few (OEE Tile, X-Y Plot) bind to two or three specifically-named inputs.
  • Multi-input widgets (Bar Compare, Multi Trend, Donut Chart, Data Table) bind to an arbitrary set of inputs you choose.

Saving & publishing

Your edits autosave as a draft a fraction of a second after you stop typing or moving something — but nothing you see live matches what viewers see until you actually publish it:

  • Publish pushes your current draft live. Anyone viewing the dashboard (locally or via the Remote Web Dashboard) sees this version.
  • View opens the currently published, read-only layout — useful for checking exactly what your viewers see without leaving Design Mode changes half-applied.
Tip

Because drafts autosave but don't go live automatically, it's safe to leave half-finished layout changes in Design Mode — your published dashboard stays untouched until you hit Publish.

Not sure what a specific widget does or what it needs bound to it? See the Widget Reference.