InfoCaptor Desktop - Benefits and Features

Benefits

• One screen information - Can you imagine the benefits of having all the critical information in just one screen rather than flipping through multiple pages?
• Information at a Glance - Present a wide number of different metrics in a single consolidated view.
• Real Time Information Tracking.
• Save Money and Resources by adopting InfoCaptor for your Business Intelligence needs. Compared to other Dashboard and BI tools, InfoCaptor is a client based tool and does not have the need to keep and maintain seperate servers.
• Save Time and money by creating dashboards using InfoCaptor as it requires only SQL queries to create them and it does not require specially trained resources.
• Simple Installation and very Intuitive to use.
• Document everything - from list of database objects to application setups and create snapshots with timestamp in PDF and HTML
• InfoCaptor gives you Dashboarding, Reporting and Documentation ability - all with just one tool.

Features

• export SQL to PDF, HTML, CSV (new)
  Simply drop your SQL query in Editor and export the contents to Excel, CSV, PDF and HTML
  • export dashboard with drills - This option lets you export all the portlets(qlets) in the dashboard into either PDF or HTML. It starts with the first Qlet
    and if the Qlet has any drills defined, then it recursively digs into the child queries in a nested loop fashion and displays the results in PDF or HTML. This is
    very powerful and useful feature as it allows you to use the tool to document your database objects and anything that is stored in the database. It creates briefing books
    that you can publish or distribute them for presentations. check the samples reports link.

  • export Qlet with drills - This option allows you to pick any Qlet from the entire dashboard and displays the results from the child queries in nested loop.
  • export Qlet - This is the basic option which allows you to just export the contents of the selected Qlet without going deep into the drills.
• Dashboard Tree browser
  This is a powerful dashboard object browser that displays all the portlets in a Tree outline. All the children
  portlets (drill portlets) are automatically shown as child nodes. This tree browser provides single click refresh to any portlet. You can
  toggle between Dashboard and Tree view. Dashboard Export is much easier with the Tree browser, just right click on any node and select the export option.

• Automatic Dashboard Refresh
  You can now set your dashboard content to refresh automatically. You can set the time interval in seconds which
  provides much finer refresh timings. You can optionally exclude dashboard portlets (such as certain detailed queries) from auto-refresh

  NOTE:All the portlets with filters are automatically excluded from Auto-refresh. You don’t want to be prompted repeatedly for entering
  the filter values during automatic refresh.

• Auto Export or Scheduled export from SQL query
  This feature is part of the Auto Dashboard refresh. During the refresh you can specify
  if you need to export the content to HTML. You can either export full dashboard or individual portlets.

• Create dashboard using Excel Spreadsheet
  This is a powerful feature particularly useful for doing quick prototypes. You can connect to a
  an Excel spreadsheet as if you are connecting to any database. You can then query individual worksheets as if they were database tables. Lets say you have
  sheet1 in your Excel file. Then you can simply do “Select * from [sheet1$]”

• Beanshell Integration
  InfoCaptor is now extensible through the use of Beanshell scripting. Beanshell is a Java based scripting language.Some of the benefits
  of scripting is the ability to modify the objects beyond the InfoCaptor User Interface. For e.g. If you had to change the object background color or change the chart’s color,
  the chart editor does not provide any means to do so but with little scripting, you can easily customize the display of any object.

• Exception Formatting or Conditional color coding
  
  With the help of Beanshell scripting you have the ability to do stop-light reporting of your metrics. For e.g if you had to display all values
  above 10000 to be green, values below 500 as red, this is just a matter of few lines.

• multiple database support
  using JDBC drivers allows support for all major databases available in the market e.g Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL etc
• heterogenous database sourcing
  e.g. In the same dashboard page or view, one window can show information from Oracle and the other window can show information from DB2 and so on.
• ability to change the connection of the qlet to any other database after initial refresh
  once the dashboard is loaded you can dynamically point the portlets to point to a new database connection and show information from the new connection. Nice, isn’t it?
• infinite drills
  Drills can be defined on any column and there is no limit on the number of drill definition
• define drills on column A and pass value of Column B
  you can pass the value of the cell on which the drill is defined or you can pass the value of any other cell in the same row
• export data to excel
  One click export to excel exactly the same way it appears on your dashboard
• spool data to excel
  If you have huge amount of data that need to be exported then you can spool output to excel. Just select this opiton and the data will be extracted in the background and when it is done it will popup in Excel
• row level seperators
  Each row in the Data window (portlet) can be colored differently, known as row banding. You can specify the width of the row band spanning multiple rows
• customize font and color of individual rows
  Alternate rows can have different colors and fonts
• customize font and color of individual columns
  Each column can be different than the rest, you can create a Rainbow out of it
• Template based dashboard designing
  Each dashboard maintains a template that can be applied to all the portlets. Similarly each portlet acts as a template to its column formatting.
• lauch external links to intranet or internet
• portlet local parameters/filters
  Each window(portlet) in the dashboard can have filters as well as they can reference the Dashboard parameters
• dashboard global parameters with value sets
  Parameters can be based on the results of a SQL query
• dependent and independent value sets
  Parameters can be based on the value of another parameter, creating a cascading relationship
• ability to reference display value or internal identifiers of the values in the value sets
  for e.g the parameter can show Employee Name in the list of values but you can reference the employee_id
• Wiring of all the portlets (Qlets) to common dashboard parameters
  lets say there are 4 portlets in the dashboard, all of them can be made to point to common dashboard parameters so that when you change the parameter value and the dashboard is refreshed all 4 windows get refreshed for the same set of values
• dynamically change the dimension of data in portlet/qlet
  with clever use of Dashboard parameters and dynamic query building you can create data windows where dimensions can be changed in the same window
• call stored packages and procedures to set context prior to querying data
  Yup! You can call database stored procedures, refresh data in the tables and see the information in your dashboard
• ability to select qlets for refresh when the dashboard is refreshed or opened
  Selective refresh of portlets. When you open a dashboard, you can set it up such that only selected windows are refreshed, rest of the portlets stay minimized. You can then click on any minimized portlet and refresh it on demand
• restrict the number of rows for the data display and drilling
  handy feature during prototyping and to ensure performance of SQL queries
• Charts like Bar, Pie, Line etc
  you get to create Bar chart, line chart and cute Pie charts
• deploy it on webserver
  install it once on the webserver and that?s it, all your users in your organization can access your dashboards
• deploy it individually on a local PC or Laptop
  alternatively install it individually on your PC or laptop
• ability to run on a USB drive, just install it and take it anywhere
  yes, you can do this!

Dashboard Reporting - More about usage scenarios