BI Apps

Overview

Bazefield BI Apps are the visual presentation layer of the Bazefield Business Intelligence (BI) platform.  They define how data sources, widgets, and layouts come together to deliver real-time insights and scheduled reporting to users.

A BI App can take one of two forms:

• Dashboards – interactive, web-based visualizations for monitoring, historical analytics, and exploration.

• Reports – formatted, scheduled documents designed for distribution and archival.

Both types share the same data sources, widgets, and many of the same configuration principles, ensuring a consistent design and analytical experience across the platform.

Training Material

This article covers the core concept and features of a BI Application.  Please continue to our Training Section if you’re ready to create your first dashboard or report.

Relationship to Existing Bazefield Dashboard and Reporting Tools

Bazefield BI Apps are a new generation of visualization technology, built independently from the existing legacy dashboarding and .brt reporting extiension files.  While both these product lines are still supported by the Bazefield Product Team, new feature development is mostly concentrated on the BI Platform from Bazefield v11 and onwards.  

The intent of Bazefield BI is not to fully replace these established technologies, but to augment them by providing:

• A modern, modular platform for visual analytics.

• Enhanced user-driven configuration directly within the portal.

• Support for interactive and scheduled reporting from a shared design base.

In many installations, all three technologies may coexist for the time-being:

• Bazefield Dashboards – for traditional live operational views.

• .brt HTML Reports – for extremely custom reporting needs, requiring html and/or javascript code.

• Bazefield BI Apps – for ad-hoc, user-configured analytics and business intelligence.

Dashboards

Dashboards are interactive BI Apps that appear as menu items within the Bazefield portal. They are designed for real-time monitoring, ad-hoc analysis, and operational visualization.

Key features include:

• Flexible layouts with dynamic panels and resizable widgets.

• Custom Time Range and Asset Filters

• Drill-down navigation for detailed analysis.

Views & Widgets

Every Bazefield BI Dashboard is comprised of:

1. One or more BI Data Sources

2. One or more Tabular Views, comprised of a user-defined grid layout

3. One or more Widgets placed within the grid(s)

During the layout phase, individual widgets can be layed out on a flexible user-defined grid.  These widgets can additionally be moved to different parts of the grid for quick drag and drop editing.  

Reports

Bazefield BI Reports share the same visualization and data model as dashboards but are optimized for scheduled, printable output. They use predefined page templates, with options for title pages, headers, footers, and standardized formatting.

Report Specific Features

While the overall user experience in designing a PDF report is similar to that of a BI interactive dashboard, there are a few specific feature sets solely applicable to reports:

1. Configurable layouts (portrait & landscape with page size selections) for professional PDF output.

2. Configurable Reporting Settings with header/footer, table of contents and title page settings

3. Report Instance comments that allow users to make a comment attached to a specific report and time frame generated

4. Ad-hoc PDF generation and automated email distribution.

App Conversion

Bazefield BI allows seamless conversion between Dashboards and Reports:

• Dashboards can be converted to Reports (and vice versa).

• Manual adjustments may be required to optimize widget placement and layout for the new format.

This flexibility allows a single design to serve both interactive and scheduled use cases efficiently.

Product Certified Apps

Product Certified Apps are pre-shipped, validated datasets developed by the Bazefield Product Team.  They serve as the baseline visualizations for Product Certified Analytics or Monitoring Apps, ensuring a consistent foundation across installations.  They are denoted by a green “product certified” shield in the BI Manager.  

Key principles of product-certified data apps

• Clone and extend flexibility: Certified apps cannot be modified, preserving product integrity.  They can, however, be cloned and edited further for user-driven customization.

• Empowerment without risk: This allows customers to innovate within their own installations while maintaining the global structure supported by Bazefield.