We are pleased to announce the deliver of a brand new dashboard builder application coming out of beta-test today. Using a more user friendly guided form taking up the whole page (as opposed to a pop-up) you can now build queries and dashboards using the same tool. Dashboards provide more flexibility including charts to report on aggregated data offline whereas adhoc queries are more suited to listing transaction data tables. Features worth a special mention include:

• Searching for and selecting fields to include in your query or dashboard is way easier as you can now search by field name, label or keyword and fields are automatically displayed from all tables with fields from the most relevant tables shown first. You can still filter by business function, table or dimensions vs. measures and you can now leave the search term blank to show the most useful or popular fields listed in alphabetical order. Finally we have developed a handy tooltip to help you understand fields better showing a longer description, technical data and example values for each field, read from your own database
• We still automatically build the joins for you using our dynamic query generator so you don’t have to worry about what tables your fields are selected from. In the case of queries optimized join conditions are automatically proposed but you have the option to select a different join condition, for example when selecting a person’s name in your query when the source table has several people referenced in it
• Formula based measures are now supported allowing you to define your own measures in both dashboards or queries based on a formula using common operators such as multiplying or dividing other measures. For example utilization could be created as a formula based on billable hours / total hours. We will be further enhancing our dashboard formula in the future to include trends, comparisons to last year/quarter and other complex dashboard-specific formulae
• You can now define permissions including who is entitled to run a dashboard or query. Other users will only see reports they have permissions for in their left panel reports widget