We’re excited to announce the new Dashboard Overlays feature.
This release closes out the Popup Multiple Tiles Overlaid on Dashboard feature request
The feature enables you to customize the Target for a dashboard tile to choose whether the dashboard opens within the Main Window, an Overlay, or automatically chooses based on the context.
- Automatic (default): When a tile is configured with the ‘automatic’ target, tapping on it will perform the navigation within the existing context (eg. in an overlay, it navigates within the overlay; in the main window, it navigates within the main window)
- Overlay: the selected dashboard will open in an overlay on top of the existing dashboard. If you’re already in an overlay, it will route within the existing overlay.
- Main Window: always navigates within the main window. If tapped within an overlay, it will close the overlay and perform the navigation in the main window.
Navigating Within Overlays
As alluded to above, once another dashboard is opened within an overlay, you can still use Dashboard Tiles like normal and the default configuration enables you to navigate within the overlay.
When you use the Back/Forward dashboard navigation elements, they will automatically navigate within the context of the overlay. If you get to the point where there is no more ‘history’ within your overlay and you press a ‘Back’ navigation tile, it will exit out of the overlay without changing the main window’s navigation.
Furthermore, if you want to use an Overlay like a pop-up navigation menu, you can configure each Dashboard Tile within your overlay dashboard to explicitly use the ‘Main Window’ target. When any of these tiles are tapped, they’ll perform the navigation in the main window and exit the overlay.
New ‘Open Dashboard’ Action
For tiles that support the ‘Open Hyperlink’ action, we’ve added a new ‘Open Dashboard’ action:
This enables you to select a dashboard from a dropdown and then configure the target just like the main dashboard tile as noted at the top of this post.
Hyperlinked ‘Modal’ Dashboards open in Overlay
A common use-case was to use the ‘Hyperlink’ action that was available in a wide variety of tiles to hyperlink to another dashboard. When opened in the ‘Same Window’, the platform was smart enough to perform a ‘fast navigate’ much like a normal dashboard tile would.
However, when the ‘Modal’ target was used, it opened up the other dashboard within a frame, which required the whole webapp to be loaded again. With this release, Hyperlink actions which link to another dashboard in a modal/overlay will automatically use the Dashboard Overlay feature.
Other Features and Commentary
- Note that while dashboards opened within a ‘modal’ supported displaying a background image, opening a dashboard within an ‘overlay’ does not support background images.
- When using the dashboard overlay feature, you may need to adjust the style of your theme to accommodate the transparent overlay. For example, you might wish to set an explicit tile background color if you previously used transparent or semi-transparent tile backgrounds.
- Album Art Tiles now support the hyperlink and dashboard actions
- If you use Custom CSS, it may need to be adjusted to support overlays
