Many settings in fPanels Designer allow you to insert placeholders which represent data from the dashboard's DSD. Placeholders appear in text in the form {Pupils.FirstName} to include the FirstName field from the Pupils panel.

Note that only data from panels in the dashboard may be used (rather than from DSD data groups that have not been used in the dashboard). However, a panel may be added to the dashboard without being include in the layout, effectively hiding then panel but making its contents available.

Select the placeholder set from the drop-down list. This will include all panels, plus the “Inputs”, the external inputs to the primary DSD. Click on any field to insert it into the current text field.

Some text entries (e.g. Narrative panel content) permit the use of “live” placeholders. These insert calculated values based on the current status

Select a “ - Live” set of placeholders and click to insert.

There are three sets of live values:

• “all” - for all rows in the panel
• “filtered” - for just those visible based on current filters applied to the panel
• “base” - for the row designated as the base value (see Panel Data)

The values available depend on the field type and the selected panel's settings

Row counts:

• count of all or filtered rows in the panel

For numeric fields only (all or filtered)

• sum of values
• minimum value
• maximum value
• average value
• median value

Note that average value uses the same output format as the field itself. For example, if two decimal places, an average will also be two decimal places.

For all fields (all, filtered and base):

• count of rows with a non-empty value (all and filtered)
• value in base row

This gives a wide range of options to include data in such texts.

fPanels automatically indexes all live placeholders in the dashboard and changes their values when data is changed or filtered. This effectively makes text “live” to the interactive nature of the dashboard.