Version Control for OEMs

As a product and R&D team, properly managing versions of your Sisense assets, (such as dashboards and data models), promoting them between your dev-to-prod environments, can be an important step in ensuring a seamless product development lifecycle process.

Sisense offers various ways to achieve this:

Programmatic Approach (Using REST APIs)

Once a Sisense Data Model and Dashboard is developed, they can be programmatically promoted to a version control system and another environment through Sisense's REST API endpoints in conjunction with a version control system's APIs.

For example, the following are general steps that you can automate with the Sisense APIs for version control of data models and dashboards:

Data Models

  1. Export your Data Model (.smodel) and save it in your repository.
  2. Export your Dashboard (.dash) files and save them to your repository.
  3. Import the data model to the new environment.
  4. Update Connection Strings in the data model.
  5. Run a Build.
  6. Schedule a build.
  7. Import your dashboards.
  8. Set the data security for your dashboards.
  9. Share your dashboards

In the case of custom data models, the Datamodel APIs can be used in tandem with the export/import process to customize data models for specific customers or use cases.

For more information about programmatic version control using REST APIs, see https://sisense.dev/guides/restApi/.

UI-based Process

You can also manually import and export Sisense data models and dashboards to and from any environment, directly from Sisense.

To export a data model or dashboard:

  1. In the data model or in the dashboard, click dowloading dashboards 3.
  2. Select the option to export the data model or dashboard.
    The .sdata (data model) or .dash (dashboard) file downloads to your computer.

To import a data model or dashboard:

  1. Data model: In the Data tab, click Import Model.
    Dashboard: In the Analytics tab, click Version Control for OEMs and select Import Dashboards.
  2. Select the .smodel (data model) or .dash file (dashboard), and follow the on-screen prompts to select and import the file.

Copy-to-Server

Sisense also provides a copy-to-server functionality for dashboards. There are several reasons why you might want to copy your dashboards locally or across multiple environments, including:

  • The ability to test and verify your data's accuracy before publishing dashboards to a production environment where accuracy is critical
  • Save external copies of dashboards for disaster recovery.
  • OEMs can support a primary server and separate servers for each of their customers, copying the relevant dashboards from the primary server to the appropriate customer server

For more information about copying dashboards to a server, see Migrating Dashboards Across Environments.