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)
- UI-based Process
- Git Integration
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
- Export your Data Model (.smodel) and save it in your repository.
- Export your Dashboard (.dash) files and save them to your repository.
- Import the data model to the new environment.
- Update Connection Strings in the data model.
- Run a Build.
- Schedule a build.
- Import your dashboards.
- Set the data security for your dashboards.
- 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:
- In the data model or in the dashboard, click .
- 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:
- Data model: In the Data tab, click Import Model.
Dashboard: In the Analytics tab, click and select Import Dashboards. - 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.