Building with Blox: A Practical Introduction

[markboos]

What Can You Do With Blox? 

Blox is a popular Sisense Add-On that opens up the world of custom dashboard development beyond the default functionality of the Sisense platform. There are seemingly endless use-cases that can be facilitated by Blox, including: 

• iFrame 
• Webhooks
• Actions 
• Redirects 
• Write Back 
• Filtering 
• Interactiveness 
• Visualizations 
• Pictures

While the application of the Blox Add-On is quite robust and open-ended, the core fundamentals are quite straightforward. 

Blox Basics

In order to access Blox, it must first be enabled in the Admin Console under Add-Ons. Once enabled, it is accessed when selecting the widget type in a new dashboard widget, by selecting ‘Blox’. 

One notable difference is that the UI changes when selecting Blox as the widget type. Instead of the typical GUI-based visualization builder, you now have a code editor. This code editor uses HTML and CSS to render a JSON object as the widget output. While this may seem to be a daunting departure from the traditional Sisense widget building, there is a core structure that is quite simple and anyone can become an expert! 

Blox Structure

There are 3 basic organizational elements in Blox code that will soon become very recognizable and allow you to quickly parse and familiarize yourself with the overall structure. 

These 3 elements are: 

• The Container is the top-most element, you can nest containers within containers, objects with containers are stacked vertically
• The Column Set divides a region within a container, and objects within a Column Set are arranged side-by-side 
• The Column is a container within a Column set, objects within a Column are stacked vertically

Using this structure to organize your visual output creates a very clear arrangement approach. Take this widget for example: 

Using the structure outlined above, the underlying code structure can be easily derived: 

Another example: 

And the underlying structure: 

Reference Live Data in Your Blox Code 

With the structure in place, say you want to dynamically show a metric within your Blox widget. Data is brought into the widget editor in the same way as it would be for a standard Sisense widget, on the data panel on the left side of the editor. Once you select a value from your data model, you can then reference it in the code using curly brackets, or braces {} and the word ‘panel’. For example, if you brought in value to the data panel and named it ‘Revenue’, the reference in the blox code would be: 

{panel:Revenue}

Wrapping up…  

Blox is an incredibly powerful tool because of its open-ended nature. Using front-end development code, a wide array of use cases can be developed to enhance the end-user experience and the impact of your Sisense dashboards. The fundamentals of empowerment in Blox are the understanding of the basic code structure as outlined in this blog post. Armed with these principles, the sky is the limit and the possibilities are endless. 

There will be an upcoming blog post with a deep dive into more advanced use cases and code snippets to support them, stay tuned!