Real-time (or close to) data visualisation dashboard in Miro?

@Connor Forsyth 

We just built an app for a client that ships data to and from Airtable from a Miro plugin.  The combo of the two apps together is awesome! 

Absolutely yes -  to the data dashboard idea. It’s both technically feasible and getting your team into Miro offers a lot of opportunities for people to engage around the metrics, organize them, arrange them… etc ... 

I mean— sure— with as little or less effort you could build an Airtable “block” / app plugin or use other scripts and such on the Airtable side for a nice looking “report” layout all within Airtable, or a separate site or whatever… but what you get with Miro is the ability to go much further into engagement around the data: problem solving strategizing, story telling and presenting, systems analysis, etc. 
 

Happy to advise if you have more specific questions around how to implement or whatever. Ask away in this thread for public learning sake, or reach in private message. 

Cheers,

Max 
 

@Max Harper Hope I didn’t become your worst nightmare with the link issues last time, but wow...something like that would be awesome. Do you have the ability to rig something like that up for Google Sheets?

I have been looking for a way to fuse the worlds of the maps that my team works on in Miro and the database that I have to use to log all the info...The possibilities with something like that video clip above look huge.

@Max Harper By the way, the Color Counter is a hit with my team. Thanks again.

@Ryan Wagner 

Yes- Google sheets is super doable. 

Glad to hear the app we built is making a difference for your team - that’s great to hear  :)

’Nightmare’… actually the opposite. Just helped another person out today with your issue and your fix. We learned together on that one. 

@Max Harper Awesome. What kind of Miro info is able to be linked up, for lack of a better term? Does it need to be text or cards or anything in particular? I have many questions but I don’t want to plague you with all of them. I am very interested in the idea and how I could put it to use, but I’m sure you’re a busy guy.

@Ryan Wagner 
Have no worries, I love sharing this stuff.  I hope it helps the community know more of what’s possible and add ‘food for thought’ / imagination. 

TLDR; Skip to bottom * * * section.

Data Available on Miro Boards

First, a couple helpful...

Concepts / Terms: 

• the SDK (software development kit) offers tools to build plug-in apps. 
  • The Color Counter app I built for you, or Clusterizer, for example are “plug-ins” they open within/ run within a Miro board. So is the app demo’d in the GIF above.
  • Like the app demo’d above plug-ins can talk to other apps from within Miro. I.e. That app can read and write from Airtable to keep a system diagram in Miro synced with an outside database representing that system in data form. (more info on that enterprise architecture app HERE)
• the REST API (application programming interface) offers tools to build apps that work outside of Miro, but access (read and write) to and from Miro boards, and to/from Miro accounts.
• the Miro Developer Platform, refers collectively to the API and SDK and board embed (embedding Miro board capabilities into other apps). 
• ‘Widgets’ are what Miro technically calls any item on a Miro board. All things on a board have a widget type. Sticky note is a widget of type “STICKER”. 
   

  

   

Data accessible through Miro Platform

So, lets explore what the platform offers in terms of data.

Here’s the widget types the REST API offers access to: 

• Sticker
• Shape
• Text
• Line
• Card
• Image readonly
• WebScreenshot readonly
• Document readonly
• Paint readonly
• Preview readonly
• Embed readonly
• Mockup readonly
• Frame readonly
• Kanban readonly
• USM readonly

The widget types inaccessible:

• mind map
• table/grid
• templates
• kanban (no read or write from SDK), no write from either 

Data on each object:

The main areas of data are: 

• id: the globally unique id for each widget 

• geometry: position, rotation(if applicable), width, height, (‘scale’ in certain cases)

• styling: color, opacity, shape type, border color/style/thickness, etc

• text: plaintext or html styled. Cards have a title and description, frames have a title. 

• topology / linkage:

  • frames have a list of widget ids for “children”( the items on that frame (unless its another frame, in which case that frame stands alone and carries a list of its children)    

  • lines have a reference to what they are connected to (startWidgetId, endWidgetId)

  • taggable items, like cards and sticky notes have a list of which tags they are tagged with. 

  • Groups. one can access a list of all board groups and for each group a list of childrenId’s of those widgets that are in that group.  

• other: when created, createdBy user id, editable, visible to app user,  

• metadata: each app can write metadata onto *certain widgets under their respective app id. 8Kb of data can be written - about as much text as what fits in a Miro “TEXT” widget.  

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Find out more about the data fields accessible per each widget →

• when using the REST API (here), or
• the SDK (here) ignore the “I” before each name and the “widget” at the end.

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Cheers, Max

@Max Harper Thanks for the great, detailed reply. I can see that it is definitely a world that is over my head, experience-wise. At some point, maybe I could bug you with a breakdown of how exactly my team is using Miro and how I’m doing double-duty updating spreadsheets with that info.

Looking at your post and clip above, it seems like there must be a better way to get info from Miro...