Server-Side API Overview

• May 29, 2019
• 2 minutes to read

The Web Dashboard comprises client and server parts:

• The client part supplies end-users with a user interface for designing a dashboard and interacting with it.
• The server part handles client data requests and provides various backend capabilities such as accessing data, storing dashboards, etc.

The Web Dashboard requires configuring various server-side options before first use. These include preparing a dashboard storage, registering predefined data sources, etc. Each platform (Web Forms, MVC, .NET Core) has a different approach to utilizing a server-side API.

The ASP.NET Core Dashboard uses an API exposed by the DashboardConfigurator class. The DashboardController handles interactions between client and server sides. The DashboardConfigurator‘s instance is passed to the DashboardController using the dependency injection.

Use the MvcBuilderExtension.AddDefaultDashboardController method to add the dashboard controller and register a default DashboardConfigurator instance as a singleton lifetime service in the dependency injection engine. This method also provides access to the DashboardConfigurator that is registered in the dependency injection as a default dashboard configurator:

using DevExpress.DashboardAspNetCore;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;

// ...

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services) {
    services
        .AddMvc()
        .AddDefaultDashboardController((configurator)  => {
            // Configure dashboard server-side settings like a dashboard storage, predefined data sources, etc.
        });
}

If necessary, you can create and initialize separate DashboardConfigurator instances within an application to provide different server-side settings.

Restrictions and Limitations

The ASP.NET Core Dashboard control has the following limitations:

• OLAP mode supports only XML for Analysis (XMLA) with MSMDPUMP. Use the DashboardOlapDataSource.OlapDataProvider static property to specify the XMLA data provider.
• If the dashboard or specific dashboard items are exported to PDF or image formats, their content is saved to the Windows Metafile format, which is not supported by .NET Core. For information on how to overcome this limitation, refer to the Manage Exporting Capabilities.
• Export to images is disabled for .NET Core because of some problems in the Libgdiplus library. See T685212 and T685811 for more information.