Copy Sections between Dashboard Pages

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Have you ever wanted to copy or move a section from one dashboard page to another, or even move a section or column into a different dashboard? The information below will show you how.

   1.        Open Catalog Manager.

   2.        Attach in Offline Mode to the catalog containing the dashboard that contains the section or column that is to be moved or copied. 

   3.        Drill down to find the dashboard containing the source object.  Note that dashboards are stored under the _portal folder.  In this example, my dashboard is called Class Links, stored in the Training folder.

   4.        The section that I want to move is currently located on the OBI291 page of the Class Links dashboard.  Double-click the OBI291 page icon on the right side of the screen.

   5.        On the Properties dialog that appears, click the Edit XML button near the top right.

   6.        Now you need to find the XML for the section that you want to copy.  The XML tag that begins a section is <sawd:dashboardSection>.  Scroll through the XML until you find that tag at the beginning of the section you want to copy. 

(The similar tag for an entire column is <sawd:dashboardColumn>.)

   7.        Highlight everything starting with <sawd:dashboardSection> and ending with the subsequent </sawd:dashboardSection> ending tag.  (If you want to move two or more adjacent sections, just highlight more XML, but be sure to end with one of the </sawd:dashboardSection> tags.

Helpful hint: I find it easier to just copy/paste the entire XML into Notepad then highlight what I want.

   8.        Copy the highlighted XML to the Windows clipboard (right-click + copy, or ctrl-c).

   9.        Click Cancel twice to close the dialog boxes.

10.        Double-click the receiving dashboard page.  It may be a page in any dashboard.

11.        Click the Edit XML button.

12.        Click the Edit button below the XML.  This will allow you to edit the XML for the dashboard page.

13.        Find an existing occurrence of a section ending tag (or, if you are copying a column, find a column ending tag).  A section ending tag is </sawd:dashboardSection>.

14.        Immediately following the existing section ending tag, hit the Enter key to insert a blank row.

15.        On the blank row, right-click + Paste to paste the XML that you copied to the clipboard earlier.

16.        One last thing: Look at the top of the XML you just pasted.  It will start with something like this:

<sawd:dashboardSection name="Section 9"

If two sections on the same page have the same name, both sections will appear in the dashboard, but they will share the same set of editing icons in the dashboard editor, which is probably not a good thing.  Change this name= parameter to some other number that isn't used on this dashboard page.

17.        Click OK twice to close the dialogs.  The process is complete.

18.        Access your modifed dashboard page to see the copied section.