The code you downloaded in the Downloading the Code section contains many projects, directories, sample files, and other material related to the Ed-Fi Dashboard. There are essentially two high-level systems included: the Dashboard UI and the Dashboard ETL application.

The systems rely on each other, so they are distributed together – but developers typically start by focusing on one or the other of the solutions.

Installing & Running the Dashboard UI

The Dashboard UI code is the visual representation of the metrics. The UI code includes a web-based, ASP.NET application along with supporting data access code. The Dashboard UI also includes the Dashboard Data Mart and the Dashboard DW data stores, which contain the pre-built results of metric calculations. The data marts exist so the UI does not have to make complicated metric calculations at runtime, which helps the system perform at scale.

The UI Developers' Guide contains conceptual and technical material about the web application. The UI Developers' Guide ends with the specific installation steps required to get the web application up and running on a development machine.

Installing & Running the Dashboard ETL Application

As noted above, the Dashboard UI relies on databases that contain pre-calculated metric results. The Dashboard ETL application is where the magic happens to perform the metric calculations and to populate the dashboard databases. The ETL application is a .NET executable written in C#. The project files allow implementers to configure the ETL application to tweak the way existing metrics are calculated, and to create new metrics based on new data elements.

The ETL Developers' Guide contains conceptual and technical material about the C# application. The ETL Developers' Guide ends with the specific installation steps required to get the .NET application up and running on a development machine.