Please Note: Any time you are altering the dashboard, it’s possible to create a situation where the dashboard may fail to load. As such, it’s advisable that you make a backup of the existing SQL before you start working on a new recipe, and always test the dashboard before considering your task complete!

Creating a testing block

Please Note: The content in this Knowledgebase Article assumes that you have good working understanding of SQL and are comfortable editing SQL inside the tools provided by Microsoft. If you need additional assistance or instruction on either of these topics, you can find detailed tutorials at codecademy, w3schools, and Microsoft’s own documentation.

Since the PocketPlatform Dashboard leverages the content and data inside MinistryPlatform, you have a lot of flexibility when designing dashboard recipes to target users within different demographics. For example, you can use your MP data to write a recipe that could present an invitation to Women over the Age of 35. 

(In order to avoid exposing internal database structure, the actual query that would be used to identify demographic information will not be shared here. Please refer to the actual database schema to build your demographic data.)

(Your dashboard may already contain a query that determines demographic data. If that is the case, feel free to use those demographic variables instead of generating new ones.)

The basic structure of a testing block is as follows:

• Conditional statement that specifies the user IDs that should see this testing block
• Optional overrides for specific demographic data
• The actual dashboard recipe

IF @UserID IN (123, 456, 789) -- The user IDs that can see this recipe right now
    BEGIN

    --Overrides for user demographic conditionals.
    SET @UserGenderID = 2;
    SET @UserAge = 36;

    -- Actual recipe starts here
    /* ===========================
    == Show to women over 35
    =========================== */
    IF (@UserGenderID = 2 AND @UserAge > 35)
        BEGIN
        INSERT INTO @Items EXEC [dbo].[my_custom_sproc]
          @DomainID = @DomainID
          ,@OtherValues = @AsNecessary

        END
    -- == E ==
    END

Once the recipe is working as you expect and the dashboard is displaying properly, you can enable this new recipe for your users.

To do so, simply remove the UserID restrictions, as well as any Variable Overrides you may have added.  For our example code, that would look like this:

/* ===========================
== Show to women over 35
=========================== */
IF (@UserGenderID = 2 AND @UserAge > 35)
    BEGIN
    INSERT INTO @Items EXEC [dbo].[my_custom_sproc]
      @DomainID = @DomainID
      ,@OtherValues = @AsNecessary

    END
-- == E ==

Good To Know