Dashboard-Assembly vs. Dashboard-Runtime

Looked in the Epicor app help and didn’t see much. When should you use a Dashboard-Assembly vs. using a Dashboard-Runtime? Most of our dashboards are deployed as Dashboard-Runtimes but the dashboards built by Epicor Professional Services are Dashboard-Assemblies. I also was on an Epicor lunch & learn recently and they deployed all of theirs as Dashboard-Assemblies. Just want to clear up when each should be used.

From what I understand, Dashboard-Runtime is just there for backwards compatibility through upgrades and all dashboards now should be deployed as dashboard assemblies. I know that you can only customize a deployed dashboard if it’s an assembly and I think the same is true for embedding a dashboard as a sheet in a form, but I haven’t tried embedding a runtime dashboard to know.

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Dashboard assemblies allow personalization, customization, updatability and are faster. In the past, copy to excel also didn’t work in runtime dashboards.
I always deploy them so they work like every other gird in Epicor.

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Hi Chadd,

I usually go with dasbboard assemblies since the copy to Excel works easiest from these and they allow personalizations.
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I’ve had a couple of variations in behavior on dashboard assembly vs runtime versions that made me choose one over the other occasionally, however. I’ll mention them just so that you might want to test to ensure that you do not get the bug in the dashboard method you used.

  • I have had multiline part descriptions parse to next Excel rows on copy to Excel when done from a sales order lines dashboard assembly but not through runtime dashboard. It might not be an issue now, but I suggest testing if it would be a problem.
  • I have had date filter NOT work on a dashboard assembly but did work on a runtime one.
  • I have had dashboard assemblies not update with the latest on user’s computers, even if I cleared the client cache. I needed to delete their epicor temp data folder to force it to get the new dashboard assembly from the server.

Nancy

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In regards to you third bullet point of a dashboard assembly not updating - I’ve found that if the user saved the dashboard to their favorites, it would cause that issue - but once I had them delete it from their favorites and re-add it (after logging out of Epicor and back in upon deploying the new version), then it would function under the new updated version.

The items saved to favorites appear to save the dashboard assembly locally, and by re-adding the new version, is what updates it. Not sure if this is something Epicor has addressed in more recent versions, but it definitely exists in 10.2.300.6

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Same here. They are (marginally) faster too.

The one pro for a runtime dashboard is you won’t run into cache issues.

@Banderson: Are you trying to start a mutiny?!?
Cache issues… Jeesh!
:rofl: