Adding a time stamp to your SEQUEL dashboard
People often want to know how current the data on their SEQUEL dashboard is. To answer this question, you can add a Run Date/Time or System Date/Time time stamp to the dashboard. This article offers a couple of different ways to do this.
Use a SEQUEL View for a System i time stamp
You can use a simple SEQUEL View to display the reserved values Current Date and Current Time from the System i:
SELECT current date COLHDG(”Run Date”), current time COLHDG(”Run Time”)
FROM sqlexec
In this View the date and time values appear on two lines. To merge these into a single time stamp field, use the CHAR (character conversion) and CAT (concatenation) functions.
SELECT cat(char(current date) , ” - - “, char(current time))
NAME (time stamp) COLHDG(”Run Date/Time”)
FROM sqlexec
This displays the time stamp on one line as a single field.
Save the View, then add it to the dashboard using the Insert > SEQUEL Object menu option. After you’ve added it to the dashboard, you can drag it to any location and use the masking technique (explained later) to hide the heading and borders.
Use JavaScript for a desktop time stamp
Another approach is to use a text editor such as Notepad to create a simple Web page (.html file) containing the following HTML and JavaScript code:
<html>
<body>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.write(Date())
</script>
</body>
</html>
This code produces a time stamp in a browser window (shown below).
To improve the appearance, you can add HTML <font> tags and formatting specs around the <script> tags to change the font color, style, and weight, as shown in the following example.
<html>
<body>
<font color=”#000099″ size=”3″ face=”Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”><b>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.write(Date())
</script>
</b></font>
</body>
</html>
Save the HTML file in a location on your Internet or network server.
Adding the time stamp to your dashboard
Open a dashboard in SEQUEL ViewPoint, or create a new one by choosing Select File > New > SEQUEL Dashboard. (The dashboard must be in design mode to add or modify objects. You’ll know you’re in design mode when the Insert menu option appears in the menu bar.)
Click on the Insert > Web Page option to add the new time stamp page. When the Web browser window displays, enter the Internet or network server address of the file you created earlier and click OK.
If you want the time stamp to show the last time the dashboard data was initialized or refreshed, use the default refresh settings. If you want the time stamp to function as a clock displaying the latest time, click File > Properties to display the Dashboard Properties window (below).
Select the Web page you just added. Then, click the Refresh Rate button at the bottom. Enter a 1 to refresh every second and click OK.
Formatting tip
If you want to display the time stamp window (or other dashboard objects) without the title and scroll bars, you can mask them. Click the Insert > Text option to display the Dashboard Text window. Enter some text in the Text box, then set the Text Color and Background Color to the same selection. You probably want this to be the background color, but initially it may be useful to pick a contrasting color. Uncheck the Show Border check box.
Create as many “blank†text boxes as you need. Next, resize and arrange them around the object you want to mask. Finally, edit the text boxes to match the background color.
Contributed by Jill Martin, Technical Services Manager
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