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Dashboards for Experience Builder

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01-31-2024 12:18 PM
clt_cabq
Occasional Contributor III

Are y'all choosing to build experience builder apps or operational dashboards these days? Any sense the the Dashboard is going the way of the dodo eventually? Is there an area where Dashboards are providing something not available in Experience Builder? For me, dashboards are pretty easy, they are mature, fairly well documented, but EB is clearly the new technology, so I'm sometimes a little on the fence about which way to go when deciding how to present information, EB taking more effort and learning energy to sort out. 

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3 Replies
Ed_
by MVP Regular Contributor
MVP Regular Contributor

Honestly Dashboards should be merged with Insights while keeping Insights UI and file handling capabilities and have a single product just like Microsoft has PowerBI.  EB is more of a replacement for Web app builder. And to your question, I think EB does not have Arcade scripting for visuals and stuff which is available in Dashboards. What product you want to use depends on what suits your use case.

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jcarlson
MVP Esteemed Contributor

As @Ed_  notes, the lack of Arcade in EB is a huge disparity. EB is great for working with maps and directly editing features, and the kinds of pages and apps you can build there continue to grow. But Dashboards' inclusion of Arcade for advanced formatting and Data Expressions outweigh that for me.

I can have a Dashboard that cobbles together multiple layers, has dynamic conditional formatting, and even virtual fields added. With enough Arcade scripting, you can make Dashboards that are laser-focused on the intended use. The fact that List and Table widgets give you some freedom in the HTML and CSS that you can define means that you can create some pretty wild things.

One of my favorites: we have a form that we use as a weekly work report, and a data expression can collect all entries for a given month, group them by submitting user, and display the resulting entries in a nice, compact, per-month list that adjusts for the number of unique users reporting work that month.

jcarlson_0-1706738078247.png

If you need to edit the data, EB is the thing to use. But otherwise, a nice, custom dashboard can get pretty interesting.

- Josh Carlson
Kendall County GIS
clt_cabq
Occasional Contributor III

@jcarlson and @Ed_ thanks for these perspectives! This helps me think about where I put my efforts.