Schedule a delivery
A schedule emails a dashboard out repeatedly, so people receive it instead of having to remember to open it. It renders the dashboard to a file and sends it at the times you set.
Publish first
Section titled “Publish first”Schedule is disabled in the designer toolbar until the dashboard has been published, and the Schedules tab says the same thing: schedules are created from a published dashboard. Publish and version covers that step.
Create the schedule
Section titled “Create the schedule”Choose Schedule in the designer toolbar, or Schedule on the dashboard’s card in the module list.
Give the schedule a name. This is what appears in the schedules list, so name it for the delivery rather than the dashboard — a dashboard can have several schedules going to different people at different rates.
Set the recurrence
Section titled “Set the recurrence”Pick an interval — every few minutes, hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly — and an every count that multiplies it. Every 2 weeks is weekly with a count of two.
Then fill in the details that interval needs. Minute-based and hourly schedules ask which minute of the hour. Daily, weekly, and monthly ask for a time of day. Weekly also asks for a day of the week, and monthly asks for a day of the month.
Set the timezone explicitly. It decides when “9am” happens, and the default will not suit a recipient in another country.
Choose the output
Section titled “Choose the output”Choose PDF or an image. Use PDF for anything with more than a couple of widgets, and for anything built in paginated mode, since that mode is designed for print and only looks right as a PDF.
Fit-mode dashboards have tabs, so the wizard also asks about export scope: the current tab only, or all tabs. Scroll and paginated dashboards have no tabs, so the question does not appear.
Write the email
Section titled “Write the email”Choose which email service sends it, then either write a subject and body directly or switch on Use template and pick a template. Templates can carry variables, which the wizard lists once a template is selected.
A body is worth writing even when the attachment is self-explanatory. Someone who receives an unexplained PDF every Monday will soon start ignoring it.
Test it before you trust it
Section titled “Test it before you trust it”Send test delivers one copy immediately. The result shows up in the schedule’s history rather than as a message on screen, so check there.
Test before you leave it running. A schedule that fails does so quietly — nothing tells you the deliveries have stopped arriving.
Managing schedules afterwards
Section titled “Managing schedules afterwards”The Schedules tab in the module lists the schedules for the service, with each one’s state — Active or Paused — and its next run time.
Each has Edit, Pause or Resume, Delete, and History. History holds the delivery results, including those from tests.
Pausing is better than deleting when a delivery is temporarily unwanted. A deleted schedule takes its history with it.
Related
Section titled “Related”Layout modes explains why paginated dashboards make better scheduled PDFs than the other two.