ManualDashboards
Introduction
A dashboard is a named, shared collection of saved searches, charts, graphs and may be other objects that you can view from one page or RT can email you whenever you want.
A dashboard can be shared between a group or the entire system. For example, in RT's own RT, we have a dashboard for the 3.8 release, shared across the RT Hackers group. This dashboard displays each upcoming RT release ticket, tickets that are blocking the next two 3.8 series releases, and some other useful searches.
There's also a dashboard portlet that shows you each dashboard so no dashboard is more than a click away. Even better is that you can just bookmark the link to the dashboard and have that be your new home page. In 3.8.3, dashboards are listed at the top of the home page so that you can more easily flip between them.
Dashboards can contain any portlet, not just searches. Ideally "RT at a Glance" will end up being just a dashboard, since there's a fair amount of code and concept duplication.
Managing
You can create, modify, and subscribe to dashboards by going to Tools menu in the UI then Dashboards. You can see some more information about managing dashboards at RT 3.8 Tutorial: Dashboards.
There are several rights protecting these interfaces and you may want to talk with the system administrator.
Duplicating Dashboards
In certain situations you may want 'duplicate dashboards.' For instance, if you use a dashboard from the web UI and would like it in one format, and someone else would like that same dashboard delivered to them in a different format with different display changes and a different sort order.
This is possible--just make two saved searches, which will display identical content but display that content in different formats.
You don't have to give them different names (the searches are given different ID numbers even if they have the same names), but you will probably want to give them different names to differentiate them and keep from accidentally editing the wrong dashboard.
In this instance, you would want to save one search to your personal dashboards, and one to the shared dashboard.
Then make the desired sort order and/or display changes to the desired search (in this case, the shared search is the one you would want to make changes to). Then apply the changes--instead of clicking "update format and search," click "update" under the loaded search in "saved searches."
This will apply those display and sort changes to the shared dashboard and leave your personal dashboard alone. Then you can share the dashboards as you wish.
Changing Sort Order of Dashboards
By default, dashboards are sorted by the unique ID given to them when they are created. If you would like to sort them (for example) alphabetically, you must extend RT.
On RT 4.0.0 and later
The MassageDashboards callback was removed in the run up to 4.0.0 in commit 6c815c8. In order to affect dashboard sorting, you'll need to wrap a Perl method in RT::Dashboards and use the ModifyDashboards callback to ListOfDashboards.
On RT 3.8.7 and later in the 3.8 series
Write a callback html/Callbacks/CustomDashboardSort/Dashboards/index.html/MassageDashboards
<%ARGS>
$PersonalDashboards
</%ARGS>
<%INIT>
@$PersonalDashboards = sort { $a->Name cmp $b->Name } @$PersonalDashboards
</%INIT>
On RT 3.8.6 or earlier
Modify share/html/Dashboards/index.html (preferably with a regular local override) as follows:
Dashboards => [sort { $a->Name cmp $b->Name } @{ $dashboards->{personal} || [] }],
see "perldoc -f sort" for more informations on sort order.
(Thanks to Emmanuel Lacour).
For Administrators
This should go into ManualAdminDashboards, which is not there yet.
Permissions
Several new rights have been added to RT with regards to dashboards. These rights must be granted (to a user or group) before the dashboard options become available: