Using the tutorial application
This guide contains numerous examples that are bundled as a tutorial with your Apama installation. Use this tutorial in the Dashboard Builder while you read this guide. Many sections in this guide instruct you to create or modify dashboards. This “learning by doing” approach is the philosophy behind this guide.
The Dashboard Builder connects to one or more correlators to discover the DataViews that the correlators have loaded. Information about these DataViews is then made available for use in the design of the dashboard.
Follow these steps to run the tutorial:
1. In Software AG Designer, go to Apama's Workbench perspective, and select File > Import.
2. In the Import dialog, expand General, select Existing Projects into Workspace and click Next.
3. Next to the Select root directory field, click the Browse button, navigate to the samples directory in your Apama installation directory, select the dashboard_studio folder. Click OK.
4. Make sure the Dashboard Tutorial project is selected.
5. Select Copy projects into workspace and click Finish.
6. In the Workbench Project View, select and display the Dashboard Tutorial project.
7. Click the Start 
button. Software AG Designer injects the necessary EPL into the correlator. The instances running in the correlator provide event data that is displayed in the dashboard. After a few moments, the Dashboard Builder appears. The tutorial is configured to automatically open the tutorial main page, which is defined in the file tutorial-main.rtv in samples\dashboard_studio\tutorial\dashboards under your Apama installation directory.
Double-clicking a topic displayed on the tutorial main page displays a page providing an example of the topic. The tutorial uses the tutorial DataView located in the monitors folder in the tutorial directory. This is a very simple DataView designed for with this guide.
Instances of the DataView are created by specifying values for the input variables Instrument and Clip Size. The DataView uses a simulated market feed to drive changes in the price of the instrument. The DataView tracks the Velocity of the Price and issues a simulated trade every second based on the Velocity being positive or negative. On each trade the number of shares specified as the Clip Size are bought or sold.
The DataView has six variables.
Instrument: The name of the instrument being traded
Clip Size: The number of shared to trade on each order
Price: The current price of the instrument
Velocity: The current velocity on the instrument's price
Shares: The number of shares currently held of the instrument
Position: The total position in the instrument.
Dashboard Builder provides a large set of objects with a wide range of configurable properties. This variety enables you to create visually rich and flexible dashboards which best meet the needs of your applications and users. This guide does not detail every object and every property. Rather, it presents the most commonly used objects and how they are used.
The information presented in this guide enables you to create dashboards for your DataView. You should experiment with the objects and properties not presented in this guide to gain even greater flexibility in your dashboard design.
Do not save your changes to the tutorial as changes might make it impossible to use it as a tutorial in subsequent sections of this guide. If you have saved it by mistake, you can restore it from your distribution by re-running the installer.