1. Dashboards in KNIME
The tool to create dashboards and reports in KNIME Analytics Platform are components.
You have already learned how to create a component: select the nodes that you want to include, right click, and select create component.
Components can include all the nodes that you want: if among them there are visualization nodes, they will be included in the component composite view.
By default, all the visualizations are stacked vertically in the composite view. To make the dashboard or report more effective, it is good practice to reorganize them in a meaningful way.
Enter the component
and click Open layout editor. In the panel, move the single visualizations around and organize them in rows and columns.
The views in the composite view are interactive. You can hover over the plots and select data points. When two visualizations show the same data, they share the selection. For example, the dot selected in the scatter plot is the same as the highlighted line in the parallel coordinates plot.
You can change the behavior of the node in the Selection section: propagate the selection to other nodes, only receive the selection, or disable it completely.
Sometimes it is also useful to show a data table in the composite view. Do that with a Table View node.
Use this node to display a static table, for example some aggregated data, or to filter rows and visualize the selected data within shared visualizations.
Additionally, you can configure it to display only the selected data. This is especially useful when you want to dive deeper into specific data points selected in other views.
Finally, add some static text with the Text View node. For example, create a title for a section and a short description of the data.
The composite view is, in fact, a dashboard that can be visualized on KNIME Analytics Platform or deployed as an online data app on KNIME Hub, to share it with others.
You can also create a report out of it, and share it, for example, as a PDF file. For that, open the layout editor and click enable reporting.
This will add two ports to the component. Add a Report Template Creator node and select the dimension of the report. For example, A4.
Connect the node to the component and add a Report PDF Writer node.
Here, select the name and a destination folder for your report.
After executing the node, the report in PDF format will appear in the destination folder, ready to be shared with the stakeholders.
We’ve covered a lot in this video, let’s practice it all in an exercise!
2. Let's practice!