Dashboard Plugin API

Your plugin can take advantage of several categories of APIs that are outlined in this article.

All the public and most of the beta-level APIs have detailed documentation in form of TSDoc. We generate the API doc website from these comments. You can find the API reference here.

Plugin contract

The plugin contract is the first API that you will come in touch with. The contract defines properties that you need to fill in and functions to implement, including the functions that allow you to specify code to run on load, during registration, and after unload.

A new plugin that is bootstrapped using the Plugin Development Toolkit sets up all the contract essentials and provides a template implementation of some of the functions by subclassing the DashboardPluginV1.

You can modify your subclass as needed. You can even add a plugin-specific internal state into this class, if needed.

onPluginLoaded

When implemented, this function is called right after your plugin is loaded and is about to be used on a dashboard. At this point, your code receives information about the context in which it will operate. Most notably:

• The Analytical Backend that is currently in use
• The workspace that the user works with
• The reference of the dashboard that is about to be loaded
• The Analytical Backend setup authenticated and ready to use in case your plugin needs to read additional data from the backend

This function may return a promise. In that case, the dashboard loader waits until the promise is resolved and then proceeds. The loader does not impose any timeout on the onPluginLoaded call. If you make calls over the network, a good practice is to consider potential failures and include timeouts and necessary fallbacks.

NOTE: If your implementation of this function fails with an exception, the loader excludes your plugin from further processing.

Parameterization

To allow a plugin to be reused across dashboards, you can make each link between a dashboard and your plugin specify additional parameters. These parameters can then be used to customize the behavior of the plugin for a particular dashboard.

GoodData treats parameters opaquely. Only soft-size limits of 2,048 bytes for the length of the parameter string are imposed. Otherwise, the parameters are fully under your control and responsibility.

If the parameters are specified on the link between a dashboard and your plugin, the loader sends them as the second argument to the onPluginLoad function.

register

This is a mandatory function that your plugin must implement. This function is called after the plugin is loaded. In this function, you then can register customizations to the dashboard.

Your function is always called with the following parameters:

• Dashboard context

  Similar to onPluginLoaded, the context contains essential information describing the backend, workspace, and dashboard.

• Customization API

  The customization API allows your code to add new content to a dashboard. Calls to these APIs are only valid during the registration phase. If you hold onto the received APIs and attempt to make changes later on, they will have no effect and will result in warnings in the browser console.

• Event handler API

  The event handler API allows your code to add or remove your own custom event handlers for different events happening on the dashboard. If needed, you can hold onto the event handler API and use it to add or remove handlers at any time during the plugin lifecycle.

onPluginUnload

When implemented, this function is called right before the dashboard that uses your plugin is unmounted. In this function, your code can do additional teardown and cleanup specific to your plugin.

Your function may be asynchronous and return a promise. At this point, the dashboard loader does not wait for the returned promise to resolve.

Customization API

The customization API is an entry point to all the customization and enhancement capabilities that your code can take advantage of. The API is described in detail in the API reference.

Customize rendering of visualizations

Call the insightWidgets() method on the customization API to get to the API through which you can customize how the visualization widgets on your dashboard will be rendered.

• To render data for one or more visualizations using your own custom visualizations, the visualization widget customization API provides the following methods:

  • withCustomProvider()

    When calling this method, you can register a function that will be called by the Dashboard component every time it wants to render a visualization widget. The function will receive a widget definition and the visualization to be rendered. This function is expected to return a React component to use for rendering that widget. If the function does not return a custom component, the Dashboard component falls back and uses the built-in component.

    Your function must determine that a particular visualization widget should be rendered using a custom component and then return the custom component. How your function determines this is up to you.

  • withTag()

    This is a convenience method on top of the withCustomProvider method. To identify visualization widgets to render using custom components, use tags. You can assign arbitrary tags to your insight objects and then use this method to register a renderer for the visualization widgets that have this tag.

    To learn how to tag visualizations, see the GoodData Cloud API documentation.

• To add additional elements on top of the visualization widgets that are rendered using the built-in renderers, the visualization widget customization API provides a method to register a “decorator” called withCustomDecorator().

  In some way, the decorators resemble a concept of middleware that you may be familiar with from express or redux. Instead of registering a function that evaluates the widget and visualization and returns a React component, for decorators you have to register a factory function. This factory function receives a provider for the component to decorate and must then return a function to provide a decorator component. The function to return has the same signature as the visualization provider function that you register in withCustomProvider.

  This is best described in code:

  withCustomDecorator((next) => {
      return (insight, widget) => {
          if (some_condition_to_prevent_decoration) {
              return undefined;
          }
  
          // Make sure you call this outside the component render function,
          // otherwise a new instance of the decorated component is created on each re-render.
          const Decorated = next(insight, widget);
  
          function MyCustomDecorator(props) {
               return (
                   <div>
                       <p>My Custom Decoration</p>
                       <Decorated {...props} />
                   </div>
               )
          }
  
          return MyCustomDecorator;
      }
  })
  

Use custom widgets

With custom widgets, you can enrich dashboards with arbitrary content. For example, your dashboard can use a built-in visualization and widget renderers and then use the custom widgets to add extra content such as images, additional text, or forms.

Your must first register a custom widget type, which is declaration of the custom widget type. The declaration links the custom widget type name and the React component to use for rendering.

Once you have registered the custom widget type, you can add any number of widgets of this type to your dashboard using the layout manipulation API.

NOTE: The default plugin bootstrapped by the Plugin Development Toolkit defines a sample custom widget that you can try out right away.

Register types of custom widgets

Call the customWidgets() method on the customization API to get to the API through which you can register custom widget types.

Use the addCustomWidget() method to register a custom widget type and provide your custom React component. The props for this component will be of the IDashboardWidgetProps type. The widget property contains a payload for the custom widget.

Add custom widgets to a dashboard

Once you have a custom widget type registered, you can add instances of the widgets of this type to a dashboard. To do so, use the layout manipulation API.

Call the layout() method on the customization API to get to the API through which you can customize the layout. To be prepared for different types of layouts that may be implemented in the future, the layout manipulation API contains methods to customize the layout of a particular type.

The Dashboard component supports only the fluid 12-column grid layout. To customize this layout, use the customizeFluidLayout() function to register your customization function.

You have to implement the fluid layout customization function yourself. This function is called with the following parameters:

• The layout as currently defined on the dashboard

  The layout is provided so that your code can inspect the layout and determine what and where to customize if needed. Depending on your use case, you may or may not need to inspect the layout. For instance, if you are adding a custom header on top of the dashboard, you can just do that.

• The fluid layout customization API

  This API allows you to add new sections (rows) to a dashboard or add new items (columns) to existing sections.

NOTE: The function that you register at this point will be called once during the dashboard initialization to modify the layout before it is stored in the Dashboard component’s state. This API does not support further modifications of the layout that is already rendered. The Dashboard component provides alpha-level APIs that can be used to add, move, or remove widgets once the Dashboard component is rendered.

Create sections, items, and custom widgets

We do not recommend that you create sections, items, and custom widget objects manually. The Dashboard component contains convenient factory functions to create these objects:

• newDashboardSection creates a new section (row) with a number of items (columns) that contain custom widgets.

• newDashboardItem creates a new item (column) that contains a custom widget.

• newCustomWidget creates a custom widget.

  When creating a custom widget, you have to specify a unique identifier for this widget, the type of the custom widget, and optionally additional data to include in the widget.

  The custom widget renderer that you registered previously will receive all this information so you can customize rendering based on the additional data.

Calculate data for a custom widget

When creating a custom widget, you often need to calculate some data for it similar to how the standard widgets do it. To calculate data for a custom widget, use the following convenient hooks:

• useCustomWidgetExecutionDataView() allows you to get data for free-form execution in the context of the widget.
• useCustomWidgetInsightDataView() allows you to get data for a specific visualization in the context of the widget.

By default, the data computation respects the filters set on the dashboard. If you want a custom widget to ignore some filters during the data computation, set it up when creating the widget using the newCustomWidget() function:

import { attributeDisplayFormRef } from "@gooddata/sdk-model";
import { newCustomWidget } from "@gooddata/sdk-ui-dashboard";

const customWidget = newCustomWidget("myWidget1", "myCustomWidget", {
    // specify which date dataset to use when applying the date filter to this widget
    // if not specified, the date filter is ignored
    dateDataSet: Md.DateDatasets.Date,
    // specify which attribute filters to ignore for this widget
    // if empty or not specified, all attribute filters are applied
    ignoreDashboardFilters: [
        {
           type: "attributeFilterReference",
           displayForm: attributeDisplayFormRef(Md.RestaurantCategory),
        },
    ],
}),

Trigger commands from a custom widget

To interact with the dashboard from within a custom widget, dispatch commands from the Model Command API.

Prepare custom widget for PDF exports

If you are loading some asynchronous data for your custom widget / visualization (either via the hooks mentioned above or your own HTTP requests), then you must inform the dashboard via the useDashboardAsyncRender hook to ensure that the widget renders correctly during the export to PDF. Please note that it may take up to 20 minutes for additional data to load. After this time, the dashboard will be exported anyway. The following example demonstrates how to do it with a custom visualization widget.

import React from "react";
import { LoadingComponent, ErrorComponent } from "@gooddata/sdk-ui";
import {
    IDashboardInsightProps,
    useDashboardAsyncRender,
    useInsightWidgetDataView,
} from "@gooddata/sdk-ui-dashboard";

function MyCustomInsight(props: IDashboardInsightProps): JSX.Element {
    // Note that the "myCustomWidget" identifier must be unique for each single rendered component
    const { onRequestAsyncRender, onResolveAsyncRender } = useDashboardAsyncRender("myCustomWidget");

    const { result, status } = useInsightWidgetDataView({
        insightWidget: props.widget,
        onLoading: () => {
            // Register widget for asynchronous rendering
            onRequestAsyncRender();
        },
        onSuccess: () => {
            // Inform the dashboard, that the widget is rendered
            onResolveAsyncRender()
        },
        onError: () => {
            // Inform the dashboard, that the widget is rendered
            onResolveAsyncRender();
        }
    })

    if (status === "loading" || status === "pending") {
        return <LoadingComponent />
    }

    if (status === "error") {
        return <ErrorComponent />
    }

    return (
        // Do something with the data
        <pre>
            {JSON.stringify(result!.data().series().toArray(), null, 4)}
        </pre>
    )
}

This mechanism is important not only for exports, but also to ensure that the GDC.DASH/EVT.RENDER.RESOLVED event is fired at the right time (after the dashboard is fully rendered).

To utilize GoodData.UI charts within your personalized widgets, it’s reccommended to make them compatible with PDF Export functionality.

Example usage:

import React from "react";
import {
    IDashboardInsightProps,
    useDashboardAsyncRender,
    useInsightWidgetDataView,
    useDashboardSelector,
    selectIsExport,
} from "@gooddata/sdk-ui-dashboard";

function MyCustomInsight(props: IDashboardInsightProps): JSX.Element {
    // Note that the "myCustomWidget" identifier must be unique for each single rendered component
    const { onRequestAsyncRender, onResolveAsyncRender } = useDashboardAsyncRender("myCustomWidget");
    const isExportMode = useDashboardSelector(selectIsExport);

    return (
        <InsightView
            insight="<your-visualization-id>"
            onLoadingChanged={({ isLoading }) => {
                if (isLoading) {
                    onRequestAsyncRender();
                } else {
                    onResolveAsyncRender();
                }
            }}
            onError={() => {
                onResolveAsyncRender();
            }}
            config={{
                // Be sure to specify this in the chart config,
                // otherwise some charts may not be rendered.
                isExportMode,
            }}
        />
    )
}

It can be advantageous to render your custom chart differently during the export mode.

You can utilize isExportMode to determine the rendering mode.

Example usage:

import React from "react";
import {
    IDashboardInsightProps,
    useDashboardSelector,
    selectIsExport,
} from "@gooddata/sdk-ui-dashboard";

function MyCustomInsight(props: IDashboardInsightProps): JSX.Element {
    const isExportMode = useDashboardSelector(selectIsExport);

    if (isExportMode) {
        return (
            // Code to render the chart in the PDF export
        )
    }

    return (
        // Code to render the chart in a common way
    )
}

It’s important to note that PDF export functionality does not capture a screenshot of the current dashboard. Rather, it reloads the entire dashboard in the background.

Therefore, if you plan to incorporate any interactive features in your custom widget, keep in mind that any changes may not appear in the export.

You may need to implement your own logic to ensure the widget renders correctly during the export process.

Customize the Filter bar

Call the filterBar() method on the customization API to get the API through which you can customize how the Filter bar will be rendered on your dashboard.

To change the rendering mode of the Filter bar, call the setRenderingMode method with one of the following parameters:

• "default" shows the Filter bar as usual. This is equal to when you do not call the setRenderingMode method at all.

• "hidden" hides the Filter bar.

  NOTE: This only hides the Filter bar from the user interface. Any set filters will still be applied.

Customize Attribute Filters and Date Filter

Call the filters() method on the customization API to get the API through which you can customize how the attribute or date filters will be rendered on your dashboard.

• To render one or more attribute filters using your custom components, the attribute filters customization API provides the withCustomProvider() method similar to visualization widgets.

  When calling this method, you can register a function that will be called by the Dashboard component every time it wants to render an attribute filter. The function will receive a filter definition to be rendered. This function is expected to return a React component to use for rendering that attribute filter. If the function does not return a custom component, the Dashboard component falls back and uses the built-in component.

  Your function must determine that a particular attribute filter should be rendered using a custom component and then return the custom component. How your function determines this is up to you.

  TIP: GoodData.UI contains API that will help you to customize the default AttributeFilter component or implement your own.

• To render a date filter using your custom component, the date filter customization API provides the withCustomProvider() method. It works in the same way as the attribute filter method.

Event handler API

The event handler API is an entry point to the event handling and subscription subsystem of the Dashboard component. The Dashboard component is designed to be fully observable via events, and you can register handlers for any of these events.

NOTE: Keep in mind that the API maturity of most of the events is @alpha. That means that they may change in one of the future versions of GoodData.UI and break your plugin if you try to upgrade to it.

The event handler API has several methods that can be divided into the following groups:

• addEventHandler() and removeEventHandler()

  These are convenience methods that allow you to add or remove event handlers for a single type of the event or for all events. You can specify a particular event type such as "GDC.DASH/EVT.INITIALIZED", and add a function to receive the event; or, you can specify an event type as "*", and add a function to receive events of all types.

  For more information, see the API reference for the event handler API.

• addCustomEventHandler() and removeCustomEventHandler()

  These methods allow you to customize the event handling setup. For each custom event handler, you can specify a function to evaluate whether the event should be dispatched to the handler function.

  For more information, see the API reference for the event handler API.

• subscribeToStateChanges() and unsubscribeFromStateChanges()

  In more advanced use cases, your non-React code may need to select data from the Dashboard component’s state using the Model Selector APIs. To do that, your code needs the latest version of the Dashboard component’s state. Using these methods, you can subscribe to receive the state updates.

  NOTE: You need to subscribe to receive the state changes only if you have code outside of React components and outside of the event handlers that need to select from the state. When in React components, you can use the useDashboardSelector to select from the state.

Interacting with the Dashboard component APIs

The Dashboard component APIs are described in the API reference. This section describes how code in your plugin can access those APIs.

The way to interact with the Dashboard component’s APIs depends on from where you want to do so.

Using the APIs from React components

Your custom React components are mounted right into the dashboard’s React tree from where they can use hooks to interact with the Redux-based dashboard APIs:

• The useDashboardSelector hook helps interact with the Model Selector API.
• The useDispatchDashboardCommand hook helps dispatch actions from the Model Command API.

NOTE: Many actions in the Model Command API are alpha-level APIs and will most likely change in one of the future releases of the Dashboard component.

Using the APIs from outside React components

Your custom non-React code may need to use the Model Selector API or dispatch actions from the Model Command API. Because that code is completely out of any React tree, you need to access these APIs differently.

• In the event handler code, you receive access points to the Model APIs as arguments. Event handler functions have the following arguments:

  • event to handle
  • The dashboardDispatch function to dispatch actions from the Model Command API
  • The stateSelect function to use for accessing the Model Selector API

  The dashboardDispatch and stateSelect semantics are the same as with the useDashboardDispatch and useDashboardSelector hooks.

• In all other code that is not connected to the Dashboard component using React or using an event handler, you need to use the subscribeToStateChanges() method. The callback function that you pass to this method will be triggered every time the Dashboard component’s state changes. Your function can store this somewhere and pass it as input to the selectors. To make the process of accessing the state easier, use the utilities for accessing the state of the Dashboard component from outside.

  IMPORTANT! Never modify the state to which you subscribe. GoodData.UI does not support this action. The only supported way to modify the state is through the Model Command API.