KLIPFOLIO: Dynamic Dashboards and Data

A division of Stratigent is focused on utilization - getting the right data to the right people at the right time and in the right format for the audience. As part of that, we have built partnerships with many of the leading visualization platform vendors. In this blog post, we will outline some of the cool, technical features of one of those partners: Klipfolio

 

 

Klipfolio is a hosted dashboard tool that lets you create real-time dashboards to make better data-driven decisions. Your data is displayed on the dashboard in small “klips” which can contain tables, charts, graphs and many other great options. The functionality within the klips allows for a lot of flexibility to ensure you can represent your data in the way you desire.

 

In addition, with automatic retrieval of data sources, users can manipulate their data using the klip-editor which separates data from your presentation and allows you to work on the technical aspect as a parallel work stream without impacting the visualization layer.

 

 

Klipfolio provides you with plethora of options to retrieve your data in a specific format and automated way. Its functionality plays well with a range of data sources such as web analytics, SQL databases, FTP files and uploads, Web Accessible URI and much more. You can set up automated queries to retrieve your data and use an authentication method wherever necessary. A refresh rate is associated with each data-source that you pull, which you can configure to match the data-freshness interval you desire for the dashboard itself.

 

 

You have the ability to access your data via a Web Service API using a simple RESTful call. In case you’re not familiar, Representational State Transfer (RESTFul) uses the HTTP protocol to make calls between machines. Simply put, it is just a HTTP GET or POST request which can handle, create, read, update and delete operations.

 

 

Suppose you have a drop-down filter feature within one of your klips on the dashboard and you want to dynamically change the data displayed based on your selection from the list. And let’s say that the data you want to filter is based on the URL structure as exemplified here: https://api.xyz.com/florida/overview/. You can dynamically pass the data in the highlighted fields above in the URI by making a selection within your drop-down list.

 

 

Creating the dynamic data source is the tough part. From there, you’ll have access to your filtered, dynamic data to create all of the necessary Klips to present that information. 

 

 

Klipfolio adds to its functionality with the DATASOURCE function, which is something many of you can make use of if you have many datasets being managed within the interface. It allows you to dynamically switch between your datasources using a datasource id which is assigned to every datasource you have created within Klipfolio.

 

The DATASOURCE function, DATASOURCE ( data-source id, pointer), takes 2 inputs where pointer is the text you want to display from your data-source. Here is an important point to note, datasource function currently only works for static datasources and wouldn’t work for the dynamic example I provided previously.

 

 

Klipfolio makes it easy to work with your data in a very user-friendly and interactive manner by hiding and taking care of the complex intricacies involved with integrating the correct datasets for visualization purposes. We are proud to have Klipfolio as one of our utilization partners and our clients have benefitted tremendously from their solution.

 

 

For further information or assistance with Klipfolio, I can be reached at info@stratigent.com.