Specifies storage, interfaces, validation, access, freshness, monitoring, and failure behavior for dashboard composition, so adopters can compose a requested analysis into a coherent dashboard of KPIs, comparisons, charts, breakdowns, explanations, and visi...
Package status: reference context ready for human review. The contract and test scenarios are complete, but no claim is made that an adopting implementation has passed them.
Decision
For Dashboard composition, implement the semantic contract through owned, typed boundaries so adopters can compose a requested analysis into a coherent dashboard of KPIs, comparisons, charts, breakdowns, explanations, and visible data-quality states. Composition arranges validated analytical results; it may not recompute metrics independently or hide incompatible scopes behind a common layout. This is a reference contract: database products, numeric budgets, jurisdictions, retention, organizational defaults, and accountable owners remain explicit adoption choices.
Scope
- The Dashboard composition actors, inputs, outputs, states, versions, and externally visible outcomes needed to compose a requested analysis into a coherent dashboard of KPIs, comparisons, charts, breakdowns, explanations, and visible data-quality states.
- The role-specific focus of this block: implement the semantic contract through owned, typed boundaries, including primary, cached, asynchronous, export, support, and recovery paths where applicable.
- Adoption-specific configuration, ownership, rollout, evidence retention, and review responsibilities needed to use the contract safely.
Outside this block
- Composition arranges validated analytical results; it may not recompute metrics independently or hide incompatible scopes behind a common layout.
- Choosing a universal database, model, renderer, vendor, numeric threshold, retention period, timezone, jurisdiction, or service-level objective.
- Claiming that packaged scenarios ran against a downstream implementation or that this reference grants security, privacy, accessibility, analytical, or legal approval.
Contract
- The implemented Dashboard composition boundary enforces this rule: A dashboard starts from one stated decision question and includes only cards whose metric, scope, interval, grain, and comparison contribute to that question.
- The implemented Dashboard composition boundary enforces this rule: Each KPI shows display name, value, unit, comparison delta, exact period, freshness, and immediate access to its plain-language definition.
- The implemented Dashboard composition boundary enforces this rule: Charts and breakdowns reference validated result IDs; cross-filters create new governed queries rather than filtering an unauthorized superset in the browser.
- The implemented Dashboard composition boundary enforces this rule: The composition distinguishes loading, partial, stale, empty, invalid, unavailable, and denied states at both dashboard and card level.
- The implemented Dashboard composition boundary enforces this rule: Executive summary, chart titles, legends, annotations, data tables, and exported files share the same metric names and comparison object.
- The implemented Dashboard composition boundary enforces this rule: Role-specific layouts may change emphasis but never broaden subject scope, dimensions, row access, export rights, or minimum-population rules.
- The implemented Dashboard composition boundary enforces this rule: A stable dashboard document can be bookmarked, shared, or regenerated with policy re-evaluation and explicit version migration.
- The implemented Dashboard composition boundary enforces this rule: The first view remains concise while metric definitions, methodology, provenance, and caveats are available without requiring analytics expertise.
Implementation guidance
- Store the versioned semantic object separately from database-specific compiled artifacts and presentation-specific documents.
- Validate at ingestion, registry, query, result, and rendering boundaries and keep one normalized representation through downstream steps.
- Roll out additively, compare old and new evidence over frozen fixtures, and keep a reversible migration until consumers adopt the new version.
- Instrument success, rejection, staleness, partial results, version conflicts, and repair without recording sensitive payloads.
Failure handling and safeguards
- For Dashboard composition, If one required card is invalid or access-trimmed, the dashboard labels its affected scope and never substitutes a superficially similar metric.
- For Dashboard composition, If sections resolve to different timezones, populations, or metric versions, composition fails until the mismatch is reconciled or made explicitly separate.
- For Dashboard composition, A saved dashboard that no longer passes current authorization returns a denied or reduced view without leaking prior cached values.
Verification and operations
- For the implementation evidence of Dashboard composition, trace every dashboard element to its result and definition, and verify that filters and periods remain synchronized across views and exports.
- For the implementation evidence of Dashboard composition, exercise role changes, revoked access, stale caches, empty datasets, partial ingestion, and failed chart rendering against saved dashboards.
- For the implementation evidence of Dashboard composition, run comprehension and accessibility review with executives, account managers, analysts, keyboard users, and narrow-screen layouts.
Adoption assumptions
- The adopting product has authenticated identity, a versioned authorization policy, owned metric definitions, bounded telemetry, and a controlled path for change.
- Names and values in the example are fictional adoption fixtures, not universal defaults, production credentials, performance promises, or business targets.
- Referenced specifications constrain protocol, security, accessibility, or vendor behavior; the adopting team must confirm current applicability before promotion.
The executable-looking examples in this package are fixtures and acceptance contracts. Run the collection validator to check structure and metadata, then translate and execute the scenarios in the target repository before recording implementation evidence.
References
- W3C WAI, Complex Images tutorial (applies as of 2026-09-12)
- W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2