Most "the dashboard doesn't work" tickets are not widget bugs. They are a missing link somewhere earlier in the chain: Data Source → Cache → Model (optional) → View → Publish → Folder → Permission → Report. iDataEngine's BI Portal keeps every one of those layers in the same cockpit, which makes the chain easy to trace instead of guessing across three teams.
The chain, layer by layer
- Data Source (SRC) connects raw data — SAP via IDATA SAP API, SQL Server/PostgreSQL, Fabric/Lakehouse, Web API, or an uploaded file — and defines columns, transforms, and cache
- Cache is filled by a refresh job; Offline widgets read from here, not from the live connection
- Data Model (MDL) is optional — it picks which source transform output a view should consume, without redefining transforms
- Flow joins or unions multiple sources into a new source when a Model alone cannot combine tables
- View is where widgets, filters, and pages are designed and then published
- BI Design places the published view into a folder; Permissions decides who sees that folder
- BI Role Management adds row-level restrictions (plant, company code) on top of folder access
Where the chain actually breaks
- Offline widget is empty → the refresh job never ran, or ran and failed silently — check the cache job log first, not the widget config
- View looks perfect in the designer but is invisible in BI Reports → it was saved but never published
- Published view is invisible to a specific user → the folder was never assigned in Permissions, or the user lacks a BI Role Management value for a mandatory field
- Two tables need to be combined and the numbers look duplicated → someone tried to do a join inside a Model; that logic belongs in a Flow
Why it matters
Every layer in this chain maps to a specific screen in BI Portal, so a support conversation stops being "the dashboard is broken" and becomes "which layer, which object ID." That precision is what turns a two-day cross-team investigation into a five-minute checklist a business analyst can run without opening a ticket to IT.