Adding panes and features to the Executive Dashboard

[JR]

Hi,

I have a small project wherein the Executive Dashboard fits the bill. I'd probably need to overhaul the database and edit the queries in the service class to adjust accordingly to my changes, but overall the changes I need are, and of which I'm hoping to reach out to you guys for answers to:

• Instead of displaying amounts and figures for sales and revenues, I need it to display hours instead (because instead of sales data I need it to display utilization figures). Is my assumption correct that I just indeed need to edit the queries on the service class with the new tables and columns that I'll add to the included database file?
• I'll need to add a pane to the left of the dashboard (the exact same pane that's there in the Sales Dashboard) to have a list of people. Each time a user selects a person from the list the data updates to be specific only to that person. To be completely honest I've got limited knowledge with customizing WPF and unfortunately have a very limited amount of time to deliver this. Is there a white paper or article specific to the Executive Dashboard to guide me though? Or was there a similar implementation through the discussions here that did so? (did a search but can't seem to find one)
• Aside from the pane, I'd also need to add functionality to Add, Edit, and Delete records per person through the app. As far as I'm aware the Executive Dashboard doesn't have that functionality and was thinking of adding it in the Information pane that expands when clicked (the one that shows SQL Azure etc.). I'd just need to call another XAML page containing the functionalities to add and edit right?
• If I'd like to create an installer for whatever will be finalized, what DLL's will I need to package with the installer and how difficult will it be to setup? Or does Telerik also have its own compiler application for this need?

We currently have a DevCraft license and thought it'd be best not to reinvent the wheel in this rather little pet project, and there's no resource at the moment here who currenlty have any background to WPF. So any thoughts would be highly appreciated! Thanks!

[Teodor]

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us. Let me answer your questions one by one:

• It is OK to use the same data visualization control, but yes, you will need to add your own tables (with time and utilization figures data) in the database and services that query them. You should surely edit the service classes in the demo because once your app work with different data, the methods should return different objects.
• We do not have white paper regarding our demos. However, your need to select data by different person is as simple as having queries that take as parameter the person's ID, so that it returns only his/her data.
• In terms of user experience you may choose different types of interface for add/edit/delete functionality. Of course, you can have different view (separate XAML page) for this, but you may also have it as popup, edit information in-place, etc.
•  We do not have own solution for creating installers. A rather simple and update-utilized deployment is the Click Once deployment by Microsoft. See more information on this at MSDN: 
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t71a733d(v=vs.80).aspx 
  We use this type of deployment to deploy our WPF controls demos, as well as the demo applications as the Executive Dashboard.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have other questions regarding our products in the process of development

Kind regards,
Teodor
the Telerik team