Container components, as the name suggests, are used to hold things. Xcelsius containers include Panel Container, Panel Container 2, and Tab Set components. I elaborate on each of these types in the following sections.
Panel Container Components
A Panel Container component is kind of a mini-canvas with a surrounding border and place to designate the Panel Container component’s title. You can drop components into the inte- rior of the Panel Container component. As you are designing your dashboard and position a Panel Container component, its interior components move with it. In a way, it is like having grouped components inside a window.
There is one reason to consider using a Panel Container component: If the components inside it are larger than the Panel Container component, it auto-scrolls. This affords the option of cramming a lot of information with interactive capability into a restricted portion of the screen.
In some but not all of the Xcelsius themes (discussed later in this chapter), you see listed within the Components gallery a Panel Container 2 component. A Panel Container 2 com- ponent is the same as a Panel Container component, except that the surrounding border has different artwork.
N O T E
If you use a Panel Container 2 component within a dashboard and later decide to change the theme to one that does not have a Panel Container 2 component, your component will be converted to a Panel Container component, and this process is irreversible.
Tab Set Components
The Tab Set component is a welcome addition to Xcelsius 2008. It allows you to click through the “tabs” and interact with different sets of components. It is relatively easy to use a Tab Set component. First, you drag a Tab Set component onto your canvas. Notice in Figure 3.12 that there are + and - icons at the top of the component. You click the + icon to add an additional tab to your set. As you add each one, you are prompted for a tab label. You can rearrange the tab order by using the Object Browser (see Figure 3.13). Each tab of the Tab Set component has a mini-canvas within the Object Browser. You select the one you’re interested in and reposition it in the Object Browser. Within the Object Browser, you can select one of the tabs in your Tab Set and use the + and - keys on your keyboard to rearrange the order of the tab within the Tab Set. Pressing the + key shifts the tab to the right and pressing the - key shifts it to the left.
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Selectors
Xcelsius 2008 has a broad array of selectors, including Accordion Menu, Check Box, Combo Box, Filter, Horizontal Fisheye Menu, Horizontal Sliding Menu, Icon, Label Menu, List Box, List View, List Builder, Radio Button, Ticker, Toggle Button, Spreadsheet Table, and Play. You’ll use many of these throughout the book, so I don’t go into great detail about them here. The ones you might want to learn about first are Accordion Menu, Check Box, Label Menu, List Box, Radio Button, Toggle Button, and Spreadsheet Table. They are easy to learn and you’ll find common uses for these.
Incidentally, the Spreadsheet Table component in Xcelsius 2008 is the same thing as the Table component in Crystal Xcelsius. Spreadsheet Table component and List view are simi- lar to one another, except that List view permits sorting and allows the user to adjust column width. Like many of the other list- and table-based components in Xcelsius, List view is interactive and can respond to your mouse clicks or movements.
I need to explain something that may not be self-evident, especially among selectors. While you may not find a drill down feature for a given component, you may still be able to accomplish the equivalent. Selectors allow you to pick an item from many members or a list. Once you’ve chosen an item, you can place its row, position, value, label, or whatever is
Figure 3.12 You click the + icon to add a tab.
Figure 3.13 Tab order can be reassigned in the Object Browser.
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available and then place that reference on a spreadsheet cell. From that point on, other com- ponents can retrieve that reference and perform a lookup or other needed task. Isn’t that what drill down accomplishes? To see this in action, open the ch03_ListViewMap.xlffile
from the download set, available from www.XcelsiusBestPractices.com (see Figure 3.14).
Figure 3.14 The List View compo- nent punts selected data over to the Map component.
When previewing or exporting the dashboard, you can click on any person in the list. Instantly, the state corresponding to the selected list item is highlighted in a different color. Also note that all the states associated with any member in the list are also highlighted. You can simplify much of your work with dashboards if you can get the various components in your visualizations to tag team. Not only will this make it easier for you to design and build dashboards, it will reduce the degree to which dashboards are perceived as disconnected.
Single Value Components
A Single Value component generally targets a single cell of the underlying spreadsheet. Oddly, a Dual Slider is treated as a Single Value component, but let’s look at what you can do with it. In the ch03_DualSliderExample.xlffile, a Dual Slider is used to control the
range of values plotted on a line chart (see Figure 3.15).
The slider is allowed to vary between the range of 0 and 3600 (see Figure 3.16), but the high and low values of the slider are read from cells B2 and B3.
What is happening in this dashboard is that the minimum and maximum X values in the plot are being set by the user via the Dual Slider. When the extremes are updated, the increment size between successive plot points is recalculated, and all the plot points are regenerated. Dials and gauges are discussed in Chapter 6, “Single Value Components: Dials, Gauges, Speedometers, and the Like.”
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Maps
As shown earlier in this chapter, Xcelsius 2008 supports the use of maps. For more informa- tion about maps, see Chapter 11, “Maps in Xcelsius.”