Dashboards

Overview

Dashboards let your team track key metrics without leaving the Bonnard app. Define queries once in markdown, deploy them, and every viewer gets live, governed data — no separate BI tool needed. Filters, formatting, and layout are all declared in the same file.

A dashboard is a markdown file with YAML frontmatter, query blocks, and chart components. Write it as a .md file, preview locally with bon dashboard dev, and deploy with bon dashboard deploy.

Format

A dashboard file has three parts:

1. Frontmatter — YAML metadata between --- delimiters
2. Query blocks — Named data queries in ```query code fences
3. Content — Markdown text and chart component tags

Minimal Example

---
title: Order Summary
description: Key metrics for the orders pipeline
---

# Order Summary

` ``query order_count
measures: [orders.count] ` ``

<BigValue data={order_count} value="orders.count" title="Total Orders" />

` ``query by_status
measures: [orders.count]
dimensions: [orders.status] ` ``

<BarChart data={by_status} x="orders.status" y="orders.count" />

Frontmatter

The YAML frontmatter is required and must include title:

---
title: Revenue Dashboard # Required
description: Monthly trends # Optional
---

Local Preview

Preview a dashboard locally with live reload before deploying. Requires bon login.

bon dashboard dev revenue.md

This starts a local server, opens your browser, and auto-reloads when you save changes. Queries run against your deployed semantic layer using your own credentials — governance policies apply.

Deployment

Deploy from the command line. Each deploy auto-versions the dashboard so you can roll back if needed.

# Deploy a markdown dashboard
bon dashboard deploy revenue.md

# List deployed dashboards
bon dashboard list

# Open in browser
bon dashboard open revenue

# Remove a dashboard
bon dashboard remove revenue

Options:

• --slug <slug> — custom URL slug (default: derived from filename)
• --title <title> — dashboard title (default: from frontmatter)

Versioning

Every deployment auto-increments the version number and saves a snapshot. Previous versions are preserved automatically.

Restoring a version creates a new version (e.g. restoring v2 from v5 creates v6 with v2's content). Version history is never deleted — only bon dashboard remove deletes all history.

Governance

Dashboard queries respect the same governance policies as all other queries. When a user views a dashboard:

• View-level access — users only see data from views their governance groups allow
• Row-level filtering — user attributes (e.g. region, department) automatically filter query results
• All org members see the same dashboard list, but may see different data depending on their governance context

See Also

• Queries — query syntax and properties
• Components — chart and display components
• Inputs — interactive filters
• Theming — customize colors, palettes, and styles
• Examples — complete dashboard examples