NextReports: Indicators

NextReports 6.0 will introduce a new type of report called Indicator.  An indicator can be used if you want to follow a single value inside a predefined [min, max] interval. It has a title, a small optional description, an optional measure unit and a specific color.

As table and alarm, indicator will have a report layout defined by convention. To create such report you will have to complete two header rows and one detail row:

• first header row has three cells : title, description and unit, last two being optional
• second header row also has three cells: min value, max value and a boolean used to show or not to show these values
• detail row has only one cell, a column or an expression, which will offer the needed value. This cell's foreground color will be used as indicator's color

You have to select indicator type for this report, so when you publish it to server it will be available for usage inside a dashboard.

Graphical representation inside server will look like the following:

In this image we can notice:

Title : Balance
Description : monthly
Measure unit : £
Min value : -1000
Max value : 1000
Actual value : -184 

Min, max and actual values are all followed by measure unit.

To easily create an indicator, you can use the Wizard tool. First you must tell wizard that you want to create an indicator:

After some steps like data source selection and query / columns selection, you will be asked to select just one column to be used by indicator:

Last step is used to set all indicator properties:

NextReports Server will allow to add indicator as a new type of widget to be seen inside dashboards:

Indicator was implemented as a HTML5 component with a color filling animation. In case your browser is old and cannot understand HTML5, indicator representation will fallback to a simple image drawn with Java2D.