Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

Almost all the dashboards in the market can be categorized as “Lazy Dashboards”. Why? To see the information, you have to click on refresh or the “go” button.

InfoCaptor is going to become one of the first non-lazy dashboards. Based on user requirements and lot of thoughts, it will soon have the feature to refresh the contents automatically at certain present interval.

There are few benefits of this feature, for e.g one of my users is having the need to display dashboards on big televisions where everybody can glance at the numbers and charts as they walk by. In this situation, you definitely need the dashboards to refresh automatically.

InfoCaptor will have the ability to set the time interval in seconds in order to meet some of those demanding situations.

This is really getting cutting-edge….more about this later once it is eventually released!

Here is a sneak peek at some of the new charting features and options that are coming for InfoCaptor.

Steps to create the following charts.

1. For Bar, Stacked, Area and Line charts the SQL query should return 3 columns

select building_name,section ,sum(max_size) from "Class"
where building_name like 'B%'
group by building_name, section

The first and second column should be character and the third column should be numeric.

If you have a query that has only two columns (one character and second numeric), then introduce a dummy column in your SQL query with a fixed value

for e.g select char_column1, 'XYZ', number_column from some_table

For Pie and Ring chart, you just need two columns, one character and second numeric.

You can change the angle of the X-Axis labels by modifying the “xAxisLabelAngle” property. Typical values are 30, 45, 60 degrees but you may use any angle.

You can choose to display Item Labels within the displayed graph and also modify the fonts and style of the item labels. You can also modify the number formatting for the item labesl. see below chart editor section.

“DisplayItemLabels”
“ItemLabelFont”
“ItemLabelFormat”

Chart Editor and Options

You would need to change the following property to change the outlook of any charts

“Name”
“Connection”
“MaxRows”

“ChartType”
“xAxis”

“yAxis”

“DisplayLegend”
“DisplayTooltips”

“PlotOrientation”
“xAxisLabelAngle”
“DisplayItemLabels”
“ItemLabelFont”
“ItemLabelFormat”

A typical business starts by maintaining all its information in variety of different formats. Information may reside on a personal database on your local machine or on a centralized server. It could reside on an Access database or just plain Excel spreadsheet.

You may be storing your finance information on SQL server and some inventory information on a MySQL or Access database.

So how do you access information from all these heterogeneous databases?

One way would be to somehow get all the necessary information on one page as a starting point (like a portal). From this page, you could drill into details or jump from one database to another and get information as you need.

InfoCaptor makes this process very easy for you. It connects to any database and you can link information from different databases on one common page or view. For e.g. you can link your Finance information from SQL server to the Inventory information on MySQL. You can view summary information in small windows (portlets), drill into details and view charts and graphs.

It also allows you to create beautiful reports in PDF and HTML, perfect for presentation and publishing them on your website.

You can export information into Excel, CSV, PDF and HTML.

InfoCaptor is perfect to do Ad-hoc Dashboards, Reports and create beautiful Documentation. It is an ideal tool to provide valuable Intelligence for your business.

For more information & to download the evaluation copy, visit http://www.InfoCaptor.com
Email: contact@infocaptor.com
Tel: 720-235-6344
Chat: (yahoo) infocaptor, (AIM) infocaptor