A public dashboard on your website

Publish a dashboard anyone can read, embed it on your site in your own brand, and keep your database out of the traffic.

A company shares its sales by region with the public: on its investor page, say, or for partners. Nobody signs in, thousands might read it, and the page should look like the rest of the site.

The question

How are our regions and channels doing? Readers want to pick a period and a region, and see the numbers change.

The data you need

Choose what you'd be happy to see on a slide in public. Monthly totals by region and channel suit this better than individual orders.

  • A date, at month grain or finer

  • Revenue and orders

  • A region and a sales channel

Connect your database with a read-only login. See Secure connectivity.

The dataset

Make a dataset for this page alone, so a later change to an internal dataset can't reach the public by accident.

  • Hide everything you don't want shown. Fields covers hiding.

  • Leave row policies off. A public reader has no user attributes, so a dataset with a row policy shows them no rows. To keep some rows back, lock a report filter, or build the dataset on a table or custom SQL query that leaves them out. See Build a dataset.

  • Don't hold data back with an unlocked filter. It shapes what the page shows, but isn't enforced: the fields' other values can still be read through the public API. Turn on Lock for one that has to hold.

The charts

Build a scorecard for the headline, a line for the trend, a bar for regions and a donut for channels. Two controls let readers explore: a date range and a region.

A report like this one: try the filters, then click a bar and watch the rest follow.

Keep it small. Four charts and two filters load quickly, and read well on a phone.

The report

  1. In Reports, press New report and pick the Dashboard grid layout. It's a responsive grid that stacks on phones.

  2. Place the charts and add filters. Set what readers see first.

  3. Set your organization's colors, logo and fonts in Settings, Brand, if you haven't. Public pages wear your brand, not Halo's. See Branding.

  4. Publish it. Public readers see the published version, never your draft.

Share it

In the report, press the Share button. You have two ways to share it, and you can use both.

On your own site

Under Embed:

  1. Give it a Name, such as Website, choose an Expiry if you want one, and press Make link. New embed link adds another later.

  2. Under Sites it may be embedded on, add your site. Use *.example.com for its subdomains, or localhost:3000 to try it out. With no sites listed, nothing can frame it except your own Halo CMS websites.

  3. Copy the code: the <halo-report> element or an iframe.

See Embedding and The halo-report element.

Under Public link, give it a Name and press Make link. Anyone with the link can open the published report without signing in. Public links can't be framed on other sites, which is what embed links are for. See Public links.

Keep it fast

Under Data for links and embeds, the default is Snapshot: Halo keeps the answers to the report's queries, so it opens fast for everyone and spares your database. A snapshot rebuilds when you publish, when an extract it reads refreshes and when its datasets change. Between rebuilds the page reads the day it was built, so a range such as Last 7 days stays put until the next one. Turn on Refresh on a schedule to keep it moving. A reader who changes a filter gets live data for that answer, still as of that day.

Pick Live only for data that changes by the minute, because every view then asks your database.

What readers can and can't do

  • They can filter, hover and click through.

  • They can't reach Halo AI, or open an explorer. A member of your organization who's signed in to Halo can still Ask Halo on a public link's page, as themselves.

  • They can't download data, unless you turn on People who open public links and embeds can export data. Then it's up to 10,000 rows as CSV, Excel or JSON, and PNG images, from charts and tables that offer it, once you publish. They can download the report as a PDF adds a PDF button.

  • They see a "Powered by Halo" badge, unless your plan includes No Halo badge.

Afterwards

The share dialog shows each link's views and when it was last opened. Views also appear in the audit log as Public reader. From a link's menu you can change its name and expiry, give it a new address, which stops the old one at once, or turn it off for good.

Publishing changes reaches the site without changing its code.

A link can open with filters already set, for a newsletter or your own pages, and shows a preview when it's posted elsewhere. See Send a filtered view.