Build your first dashboard

Understanding the Dashboards tool

A dashboard tool transforms data into visual representations, allowing you to represent it in different ways suitable to your use case.

Dashboards serve as the "storefront window" for your graph data - they display the most important insights in a visual format.

The AI tool allows you to quickly prototype and build production-ready dashboards.

Creating your first movie recommendation dashboard

Build a dashboard that visualizes actor relationships in your movie recommendation dataset. This dashboard will help stakeholders understand which actors frequently collaborate and how these relationships influence movie recommendations.

Navigate to the Dashboards tool:

Before creating your dashboard, make sure your instance contains the sample movie data. If you haven’t done that yet, go back to lesson 3 - Exploring Dashboards in the Getting Started module and follow the steps to load the data.

Go to the Dashboards tool and click Create with AI to begin.

Enter a description of the insights you want to visualize. For example, you can enter a description like "Visualize actor relationships in movies." or simply "Actor relationships":

Create a new AI generated dashboard by clicking the "Generate with AI" button, which will prompt you to enter a description of the insights you want to visualize. The AI will then generate a dashboard based on your description:

You should have a dashboard that looks similar to this:

Adding more cards

Dashboard cards are individual components that display specific data visualizations.

Click Add a card to create your next visualization:

You can create cards using AI prompts or Cypher queries. To create a card with AI, use the natural language feature in the card editor:

Creating cards with Cypher queries

Create cards using Cypher queries directly for more precise control over what data is displayed.

From your dashboard, click Add a card to open the card editor.

Use the card editor to define the card properties:

For example, create a card that shows which movies Tom Hanks has acted in:

MATCH (p:Person)-[r:ACTED_IN]->(m:Movie)
WHERE p.name = 'Tom Hanks'
RETURN p,r,m

Your dashboard will display a graph visualization showing 'Tom Hanks' movie connections:

Editing cards

Production dashboards often require updates as data and requirements evolve.

You can edit a dashboard card by clicking the three-dot menu on the card and selecting Edit card.

Make the changes you want, then click Save changes to update the card.

Making dashboards interactive with filters

Filters allow users to dynamically change what data is displayed without modifying queries.

To add a filter to your dashboard, go to the dashboard view and select Add filter:

For example, create a "Person selection" filter that will control which actor’s data is displayed.

Now update your Actor Overview card query to use the filter parameter:

MATCH (p:Person)-[r:ACTED_IN]->(m:Movie)
WHERE p.name = $person_name
RETURN p,r,m

Save your changes and test the filter:

Your dashboard now responds dynamically to filter selections:

Where dashboards fit in your workflow

The dashboard tool enables: