Dune-Building a Dashboard
Dashboard for this post found here →https://dune.xyz/mtitus6/mtitus6-playground
Once you have your visualizations cleaned up, the transition into a Dashboard is pretty simple, albeit a little quirky
The process of starting a new dashboard is not as intuitive as I would like, but it keeps in line with the Dune structure of everything ties back to the query.
To create a new dashboard you must successfully run a query, select your visualization, and then below the visualization, select “Add to dashboard”. You can either select an existing Dashboard or select the option for a New Dashboard.
After selecting “New dashboard”, it then will prompt you for a name, and then the dashboard name will appear in a list with an Add button next to it. You still have not added the visualization until you click the Add button. There is no prompt or confirmation after you hit the Add button, so at first I thought it was not working. Also a little quirky, selecting the Dashboard name will not Add the visualization but rather navigate you to the Dashboard.
On my first attempt trying to Add my visualization not only did I end up with six of the same charts (little click happy) but also turned up with chart objects that displayed a SQL error.
This was because I had multiple queries in the SQL statement (was highlighting individual queries to run). I had to Fork my query into a new query with a single SQL statement that could fully compile without any errors.
After cleaning that up and adding both my Line Chart and the Table, I now have a Dashboard. Feels like quite an accomplishment.
Now that I have a dashboard, I wanted to click around to see how they worked.
To begin editing the dashboard you must first click Edit. After clicking Edit 3 4 buttons will appear; Settings, Add text widget, Add visualization, and Done. Let’s go through all of them.
Clicking the Settings, controls your dashboard names and tags. One specific note here is even if you change the name the URL does not change. Important note if you are OCD like me.
Clicking Add Text widget is for written text in your dashboard. The text widget mentioned markdown language supported which peaked my interest.
I haven’t worked a lot with markdown language so I had to do some refreshing. See my hyperlink above which has most of the syntax nicely outlined. I made a pretty cool text widget showing all the variety of things you can do. One thing I could not get to work is a hyperlink, which seems like a pretty important element. Will have to follow up on that one, because I do see examples in other dashboards on Dune.
Moving things around is as simple as dragging and dropping. Resizing is also straightforward just pulling from the edges of the objects.
Once you have the Dashboard created, adding objects is much easier. Click Add Visualization which opens up a list of all the visualizations you have created, and a nice little icon next to each of them indicating which type of visualization it is (Line, Pie, Bar, etc.).
Once you are done editing, clicking Done locks everything in place until your next Edit.
Look forward to playing with this more, but onto the next learning exercise.
For the next post, I want to look more closely at the type of metrics that are important for each different type of Ethereum project. I think it is important to understand what needs built before diving into how to build something that is not useful.
Cheers!
