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Customization & Themes

Common Customizations​

You will find below some common customizations and dashboard configurations that are available for end users.

Dashboard properties

For a full list of available dashboard properties and configurations, please see our Dashboard YAML reference page.

Changing Available Filters​

default_time_range

Default time range controls the data analyzed on initial page load. Setting the default time range improves user experience by setting to most frequently used period - in particular, avoiding all time if you have a large datasource but only analyze more recent data.

The value must be either a valid ISO 8601 duration (for example, PT12H for 12 hours, P1M for 1 month, or P26W for 26 weeks) or one of the Rill ISO 8601 extensions.

smallest_time_grain

Smallest time grain available for your users. Rill will try to infer the smallest time grain. One of the most common reasons to change this setting is your data has timestamps but is actually in hourly or daily increments. The valid values are: millisecond, second, minute, hour, day, week, month, quarter, year.

available_time_ranges

One of the more important configurations, available time ranges allow you to change the defaults in the time dropdown for periods to select. Updating this list allows users to quickly change between the most common analyses like day over day, recent weeks, or period to date. The range must be a valid ISO 8601 duration or one of the Rill ISO 8601 extensions - example below.

  available_time_ranges:
  - PT15M 
  - PT1H
  - P7D
  - P4W
  - rill-TD ## Today
  - rill-WTD ## Week-To-date

available_time_zones

Rill will automatically select several time zones that should be pinned to the top of the time zone selector. It should be a list of IANA time zone identifiers. You can add or remove from this list for the relevant time zones for your team.

Setting Default Views for Dashboards​

default_dimensions

For dashboards with wide tables, setting default dimensions is a good way to make sure that users can focus on the primary analyses and ensure a positive first experience. Each dimension listed under the default_dimensions setting would appear on the screen, while the remainder of the dimensions would be hidden (and still available for selection under filters). Common use cases for setting default fields would be to simplify dashboards on initial load, to narrow the dashboard to the most used fields, and to avoid high cardinality fields (that may take longer to load, but are used less often so improve performance). An example addition to the dashboard.yaml file is below.

default_dimensions:
  - column1
  - column2
Column vs. Name Usage

The column property is used by default from the column name in your underlying source. If you decide to use the name property, you'd replace the column above with the field name.

default_measures

A list of measures that should be visible by default. Operates the same as the default_dimensions configuration. When selecting measures, by default, consider hiding more computationally intensive measures like count distinct or other complicated expressions to improve performance.

Changing Themes & Colors​

In your Rill project directory, create a <theme_name>.yaml file in any directory. Rill will automatically ingest the theme next time you run rill start or deploy to Rill Cloud and change the color scheme of your dashboard.

First, create the YAML file as below. In this example, the charts and hover in Rill will change to Plum while spinners will change to Violet.

type: theme
colors:
  primary: plum
  secondary: violet

Once you have created that file, update the dashboard.yaml with the following configuration (we typically add this at the top along with time zones, time series and other configurations):

default_theme: <name of theme yaml file>

Theme properties

For more details about configuring themes, you can refer to our Theme YAML reference page.

Dashboard Measure Formatting​

Formatting for individual measures on a dashboard can be controlled through the format_preset and format_d3 properties.

Euro currency​

Instead of displaying a numeric measure in USD currency, the euro currency can be used instead through format_preset. In the following example dashboard.yaml, the Total Revenue measure will be displayed using euros in the resulting dashboard.

type: metrics_view
title: example_dashboard
model: example_model
measures:
  - label: "Total Revenue"
    expression: SUM(revenue)
    name: total_revenue
    description: "This measure calculates the total sum of revenue"
    format_preset: currency_eur
Measure formatting options

For a full list of available dashboard measure formatting options, please see our Dashboard YAML reference page.