Midyear 2021 Technical Track Exercise
Background
Most JMP Live customers are interested in automated reports, dashboards and/or control chart warnings. The most effective way to use these features is by an automated process that looks for fresh data, updates the dashboards and/or reports and publishing them to JMP Live. When demonstrating JMP Live to customers, you can describe how this works, but it is much more impactful to show them an example. If you have an automated report running on your computer, you can show them the task scheduler and the resulting reports. Often showing an example generates a lot of questions and excitement about the capability.
Objective
At the end of this exercise, you will have a JMP Live report that refreshes daily using a scheduled task. We will use a special data table with several features designed to make this as simple, and flexible, as possible. You are encouraged to customize the data and the report published to JMP according to the JMP Live opportunities in your territory. Once this is set up, the reports will run automatically. This will make it easy to show a working example to your customers.
Process
We will conduct the exercise as a workshop going step by step through the process. Some of you may already have an automated JMP Live report running. If this is the case, perhaps you can spend the time generating another one for a different market segment. There should be plenty of time for Q&A if you run into issues. Hopefully there will also be time to share resulting JMP Live reports and learn from each other.
Sequence
- (10min) Download the special data table set up for this exercise. This is posted in the Technical Reference Library at D68 Auto Updating Data Table for Automated JMP Live Dashboards. We will spend some time going through the features and let you try some customizations.
- (10min) Using the data, build a dashboard and save this as a table script. There is a dashboard already provided as an example. This can also be changed later. Simply updating the dashboard will result in an updated JMP Live report without any additional effort.
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(10min) Customizing the JMP Live publishing details. You will need named connections to devlive16 and JMP Public. If these are not already set up, we will walk through an illustration. These details need to be saved to a publish script that is embedded in the data table. This requires changing only 5 lines of code so don’t worry about a lot of JSL details.
- (10min) Setting up a dashboard publish script. An example is included in this post. This is a very simple script that will publish the dashboard to JMP Live. You will have to customize lines 5 and 6 (see below) to point to your file. Also, notice that the last line is commented out. The Exit() command closes JMP. When running this as an automated task, you will want to close the JMP session that generates the dashboard. However, during debug, you will want to test the script without shutting JMP down. Once everything is working, remove the two backslashes in front of Exit().
- (10min) Setting up a scheduled task. On Windows machines, this is done using Task Scheduler. On the Macs, this is done using Automator. For step-by-step screen shots, see the help guides.
- (10min) Collaborating and sharing results. On devlive16, there is a group called "SE Technical Track". We can use this to share results.
Follow-up
There will be a recording of this entire process. If you need more time or extra help, let me know. After the workshop, everyone is encouraged to customize their data and dashboards to support their next JMP Live engagement or their most likely prospective customer for JMP Live.
7/20/21 update. I changed the help file for Automator on the Mac. The original version did not create a separate instance of JMP for the dashboard. This causes a problem (thanks Byron for pointing this out) when the scheduled task completes and shuts down, it could take down an existing session. The new version creates a separate instance of JMP and avoids this problem.
