WebFOCUS Online Help > Managed Reporting Administrator > Managing Dashboard > Managing Public Views

Public views allow you to publish information on the Web and allow users to view reports and other information without having to log in. There are two types of public views:

• General public view. Contains any type of information and is intended for a wide variety of audiences.
• Custom public view. Provides detailed information targeted for specific groups of users. Access to a custom public view is the same as the general public view, with the default user ID and password as the authentication information. Therefore, the public user can view reports and data that are available in the general public view and custom public views.

Custom and public views can be made secure through the addition of Web server security. To increase security on public views so that each public page has access only to the intended information, you can restrict the public pages on the HTML files that display the view. For details, see Creating Public and Group Views.

In addition, since the information in each public view (general or custom) may not be relevant to every public user who connects to Dashboard, you may want to prohibit certain functionalities by excluding the display of available domains from the general and custom public views. In other words, you control the information a public user can view. To manage access so that users only see relevant information:

• Allow access to only those domains with public information.
• Eliminate the display of the Domain Tree and Role Tree in the Dashboard.
• Eliminate the domain search.
• Restrict the ability to run reports. If there is a high volume of traffic to a public view (general or custom), decrease the load on the Web server and the WebFOCUS Reporting Server by restricting users from running reports that directly access data. This is useful if a public view contains launch blocks in which the report runs automatically when the public user opens the Dashboard.

  To prevent public users from running reports, you can select only pre-built reports from the Report Library for the Role Tree, List blocks, and Launch blocks. To allow public users to view updated reports without having to run them, use ReportCaster to generate report output and send the output to the Report Library. The content for public pages can be created using reports archived in the Report Library. For more information, see the ReportCaster Development and Administration manual.