App Builder overview

The App Builder lets you wrap one or more dashboards into a single, branded, multi-page App. Where a dashboard is one grid of tiles, an App is a small product: a header with your name and logo, a navigation menu, a theme, and as many pages as you need — each page its own dashboard grid.

Apps are saved as .saikuapp documents in the repository, right alongside your .saiku queries and .saikudash dashboards. They open from the Apps area at /apps.

App vs. dashboard

A dashboard answers “what does this one board show?”. An App answers “what does my audience do here?”. The difference is mostly navigation and framing:

	Dashboard	App
Scope	One grid of tiles	Many pages, each a grid
Navigation	None	Left rail or top tabs between pages
Branding	Inherits the Saiku UI chrome	Own header, logo, name, theme
File	.saikudash	.saikuapp

If you only need one board, build a dashboard. Reach for an App when you want to hand someone a coherent, navigable, on-brand surface — an executive pack with a page per department, a customer portal, a product tour.

Creating an App

From the Apps list, you have two starting points:

• + New app — a blank App with one empty page (“Overview”). Name it, pick a folder (defaults to your home folder), and you land in the editor.
• New app from dashboard… — pick an existing .saikudash; its layout becomes the App’s first page. The fastest way to promote a dashboard you already like into a branded App.

Either way the App is created as a .saikuapp file and you’re dropped straight into the editor.

Navigation: rail vs. top

An App’s pages are reachable through a navigation menu, and you choose where it sits:

• Rail (default) — a vertical menu down the left-hand side. Good for Apps with several pages, or longer page names.
• Top — a horizontal tab bar across the top. Good for a handful of short-named pages.

On narrow screens the left rail automatically collapses to a bottom bar so the page content keeps the full width.

View mode vs. edit mode

A saved App opens full-bleed in view mode — its own header and navigation fill the window, with none of the generic Saiku chrome and no editing affordances. It’s exactly what your audience sees.

To make changes, click Edit in the header. Edit mode reveals the per-tile controls, the + Add tile and filter affordances, and two more buttons: Design (the theming / chrome inspector — see below) and Save. Flip back to view any time.

Theming & design

Each App carries its own theme, and you brand it graphically — no code. Click Design in edit mode to open the inspector: a preset gallery (Editorial, Minimal, Dark Ops, Corporate), colour / type / form pickers, a describe-your-brand box that turns a sentence into a theme, and tabs for the header, navigation, assistant, and page settings. Everything previews live.

Tip

See Design & theming for the full tour of the inspector — presets, tokens, describe-your-brand, and the header / nav / assistant / pages controls.

Note

The presets and tokens cover the vast majority of branding. For the long tail there’s an Advanced — custom CSS escape hatch; it is always sanitised and scoped to that App, so it can’t leak into the rest of the Saiku UI.

Where to go next

• Design & theming — brand the App with presets, pickers, and describe-your-brand; configure the header, nav & assistant.
• Building pages & tiles — add pages, drop tiles, and bind them to your cubes.
• The Chart tile — sixteen chart types, dual axes, trend lines, anomalies, forecasting and cross-filtering.
• Custom tiles — the declarative ranked-list, ECharts-option and graph renderers.
• Plugins — admin-installed sandboxed-JS tiles.
• Embedding an App — put an App on any web page with <saiku-embed>.

Related

• Analyze — where ad-hoc cube querying lives.
• Embedding Saiku — the embed surface Apps share with dashboards and saved queries.