New Dashboard Editor/View

Joseph Endter

We are using dashboard views of data, where the underlying reports have a criteria based on the current user. Typically if these reports are empty they would show as such in the dashboard. With the new dashboard editing tool these reports now show as an error (Oops! Something went wrong - Sorry, we ran into an unexpected error trying to retrieve data for your widget) This is causing a lot of confusion amongst our users, is there anything I can do to have these reports just show as being empty?

Bassam Khalil

Hi @Joseph Endter

Hope you are fine, please try the following in the report filter use ( current user & Blank ) and add on your intake sheet a row contain any data without assign to contact ( Blank ) and you will see only this row when the report is empty.

Joseph Endter

Thank you for the response @Bassam.M Khalil, unfortunately this solution did not solve my issue. I believe this is due to the multiple criteria in my reports. In order for this to help I think I would need to create a line with a blank user for every set of conditions that my reports use. This really isn't a practical solution. This seems to be something that should be changed in the coding of the new dashboard editor. In the classic view the message that appeared was much clearer, and less alarming, to the user. (Widget results are empty for you.)

Thanks again

Joseph Endter

Rob Hagan

Hi Joseph,

We have the same problem. Our widget (that contains the rows from one report) works fine in the "old look" dashboard - showing rows where there are any and "Widget results are empty for you" when there are none.

Switching over to the "new look" gives an error when there are no rows to be displayed (as your graphic graphically demonstrates).

Surely this is an error in the implementation of the new dashboard.

The workaround of changing (all of) our reports so that they show at least one row to compensate for this error is not a proper solution to the problem IMHO. It's not logical to do so, as when there are no data rows that should be displayed (as per specification of our implementation), then no data rows should be displayed. Doing so will be misleading to our users.

I hope that this gets fixed quickly.

Cheers,

Rob.

Joseph Endter

Looks like they've updated the error message to now be more clear that it is not an error, but that the data was filtered out. Much more understandable for the user.

Joe

Rob Hagan

Excellent! I'll look out for it the next time that report on my dashboard has no data rows. Thx

Leigh Ozdemir

Now it's more understandable, but it's bright orange, so it still looks like an error. It has no data, but it SCREAMS that it has no data, drawing attention to itself amidst all the other widgets that do have data and are therefore much more meaningful. If you hover your mouse over it, it also says that it has no data because of the current user filter and suggests you remove this. This REALLY makes it look like the dashboard creator screwed up.

And it doesn't show the report framework, so unless you know the dashboard really well, you don't even know what's "broken".

I'm also really confused about the overall handling of "current user" filters. Other widgets, such as reports that filter on tasks within a certain date range, are fine. They correctly show the report headers and no rows. This is how this filter should always have been handled. No data is just no data. It doesn't mean anything's wrong.

I've created a work-around (the above suggestion won't work for our specific situation), but now I've got to apply this convoluted thing to 60+ reports, and anyone working on these dashboards in the future is going to have to understand this weird work-around, all because Smartsheet handles current user filters differently from all other filters.

Not happy.

Russell Baines

Overall I'm very disappointed in the new look dashboards, find them very unstable, the widgets bounce all over the place and they are so slow to update. Please bring back the classic option!!!