Making a dashboard render more quickly

[pasichp]

[ FlexSim 24.1.0 ]

Dashboards don't seem to be scaling well with the number of elements they feature: I am attaching a model with a dashboard with a grid of 400 edit fields. Opening this dashboard and manipulating its window (docking/undocking) is noticeably slow. For comparison, I made a GUI with a grid of 400 edit fields which doesn't seem to struggle from a similar issue.

Is there a way in which I could make the existing dashboard load as quickly as a GUI? I'd like to see if there are any workarounds of modifying the existing dashboard before I resort to the arduous task of recreating it in a GUI.

FlexSim struggling with dashboards with many editable fields.fsm

[nilP8GEZ]

Hello Przemyslaw,

I am not sure why this is happening, but I have a hypothesis that it occurs because the dashboards have the ability to be larger and scalable with the scroll bar, and I suppose it takes time to determine the size.

As a workaround, you can create a custom GUI inside the dashboard. With that, you can change the link to your GUI, and it will be faster than using just the dashboard.

Even so, I would appreciate it if someone has a better explanation for this.

Thank you!

flexsim-struggling-with-dashboards-with-many-edita_1.fsm

[logan_gold · Accepted solution]

There is a lot more that goes into the Dashboard widgets vs GUI widgets. For Dashboard widgets, you have additional widgets for moving, sizing, and rotating. They also have undo history and other UI components like drag-drop functionality and context-sensitive selection and properties.

The GUI widgets don't have these features. A GUI is just a bunch of widgets that you can't interact with dynamically from within the GUI itself.

I second the workaround of embedding GUIs into a Dashboard with the GUI Class model input widget, if you want the performance of a GUI within a Dashboard window. Unfortunately, that does require recreating everything in a GUI.

The only other way I can think of it to limit the number of widgets in the Dashboard. Maybe you could combine the functionality of a bunch of text widgets (static and/or dynamic) into a Model Documentation widget. Or use a Table widget to combine multiple inputs. You could even point the Table widget to a Parameter Table (through the Parameter Table's tree, MODEL:/Tools/ParameterTables/ParameterTableName>variables/parameters).

[pasichp]

Thanks Logan; I've done one step towards limiting the number of widgets in my Dashboard by kicking out all of the dynamic text fields that didn't display anything and replacing them them all with a single static image sitting in the background. However, that didn't make enough of a difference to completely eliminate this issue. I suppose it's time to brush up on my GUI-ing skills!