Dashboard Widgets: Charts and Tables

In this lesson, let's change our dashboard to something more interesting than static placeholders.

Typically, we have charts and numbers on the dashboard of such projects. So, we can calculate something like these:

• Tasks completed vs in progress
• Tasks due today
• Tasks created this week, grouped by day

Let's show them all on the dashboard.

Change Factory and Re-Seed Data

To have some data to show, we need to randomize a few things and seed more tasks.

database/factories/TaskFactory.php:

return [
    'name' => fake()->name(),
    'is_completed' => fake()->boolean(),
    'due_date' => fake()->dateTimeBetween('now', '+1 month'), 
    'created_at' => fake()->dateTimeBetween(now()->startOfWeek(), now()->endOfWeek()), 
];

database/seeders/DatabaseSeeder.php:

Task::factory()->count(10)->create(); 
Task::factory()->count(100)->create(); 

And now, let's freshen and re-seed the whole database (yes, we lose the data, but this is a demo project, so I'm okay with that).

php artisan migrate:fresh --seed

Great, we have 100 random tasks in the database:

Dashboard Controller with Data

By default, we load the dashboard directly from the Routes file.

routes/web.php:

Route::get('dashboard', function () {
    return Inertia::render('dashboard');
})->name('dashboard');

Now, let's add more logic. So, we need a Controller...