Dashboard Components Best Practices and Considerations

What Exactly Is a Dashboard Component?

A dashboard component is the type of widget that dashboard builders use to group and reuse common parts of multiple dashboards. Dashboard components aren’t used to package and distribute assets such as datasets and lenses. For information about analytics components used to share CRM Analytics assets, see CRM Analytics Distribution and Packaging. Dashboard components can contain another type of custom web component that’s built using HTML and JavaScript. For information about web components, see Add Lightning Web Components to the Dashboard.

What Makes Dashboard Components Special?

• They’re efficient. You can build and manage the common parts of multiple dashboards in one place.
• They give your dashboards a consistent look and feel. Create a uniform and consistent experience for your users by building and managing dashboard components.
• They’re collaborative. Build dashboards as a team when you share and reuse dashboard components.

Are Dashboard Components Right for You?

Look for repetition. Are there common elements such as logos or performance metrics in multiple dashboards? For example, your call center teams use three dashboards to monitor cases for Silver, Gold, and Platinum accounts. Each dashboard is unique, but they likely use the same company branding, filters, or groups of KPIs. Dashboard components are a great way to manage these common elements.

Use Dashboard Components Effectively

• Make a plan. Components are powerful because you can build them one time and reuse them everywhere. Take time to understand how to optimize reusability across your dashboards before you start creating dashboard components.
• Create components that fulfill one purpose or contain a unique grouping of content. Components with too many parts or dependencies are applicable to fewer dashboards.
• Make components that are easy to maintain. Make sure that other dashboard builders can understand your strategy. Consider naming conventions. Give users access to the app where the dashboard component is saved so that they can see and edit the component’s contents.

Dashboard Components Considerations

Keep these considerations in mind when using dashboard components.

• You can add up to 10 dashboard components to a dashboard, and each dashboard component can contain up to 20 pages.
  

  Note Use the navigation widget that contains tabs for maneuvering between pages. Mobile users also have access to the navigation widget when it’s added, otherwise they must swipe to access other pages.
• Layouts aren’t supported in dashboard components.
• You can save components in a private app or in shared apps. Keep in mind that components saved in a private app can be used in other apps, but the contents of the component are visible only by you.
• If you delete a component that’s used in other dashboards, keep in mind that you’re deleting the contents of the component only. The component is empty wherever it’s used in other dashboards.
• To make elements within a dashboard component interact with other elements of a dashboard, including filters in embedded dashboards, set the dashboard component to “Allow filtering and faceting”. Deselect the "Allow filtering and faceting" check box if you don’t want the component to be filtered or to filter other dashboard widgets outside of this component.
• When you create a dashboard component, size the component so that the widgets within the component fill up the horizontal space inside the component border.
• To avoid multiple scroll bars on containers and contents in dashboard components, size widgets to show all available content.
• Copying and pasting a dashboard component is different than copying and pasting a standard widget. When you copy and paste a component, the newly created component uses the same query as the original component. When you copy and paste a standard widget, you create a copy of the query used by the new widget.