Why do I not have the option to add a control to a jira dashboard? What is required?

[Allan Hope]

I only have the option to add gadgets.

[Marlene Kegel - codefortynine]

Welcome to the community, @Allan Hope and @Greg Frater,

I am Marlene from codefortynine.

Adding a control to you Jira dashboard is only possible with an app. 

For example our app Quick Filters for Jira Dashboards comes with a Quick Controller on which you can define filters to dynamically filter all other Quick Gadgets on your dashboard.

Of course it is also possible to filter the dashboard per sprint.

You can check out our app without installation of our demo dashboards.

[Jeroen Poismans]

Hi Allan, Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

What other "things" do you expect to be able to add to a dashboard? Can you give an example?

Regards,

Jeroen

[Allan Hope]

Hi, I would like to add a control like a dropdown that would populate a variable.

[Jeroen Poismans]

Ok, just to make sure we're on the same page, this is an example of a Jira dashboard with gadgets:

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-core/jira-core-dashboard-project-status-glance

What is it that you want to achieve other than this? You would like to populate a variable you say, but to what end, what should it do in context of a dashboard. Can you explain the entire use-case

Without extra information the answer is: No, you can not put anything else than a gadget on a Jira dashboard.

Regards,

Jeroen

[Greg Frater]

Hi Jeroen, 

I can't answer your question for the OP but I can for our (my) use case.  I have a dashboard built to show a number of metrics for a given sprint.  I'd like to reuse the dashboard for the next sprint and subsequent ones after that.  As it is now I need to edit the query of each gadget each time the sprint changes.  It would be much more convenient to build each gadget query with a variable and set that variable from a dropdown at the top of the dashboard.  Unless there is a better way that I don't know of this seems to likely be the most efficient/effective way to do this.

Cheers,

-Greg F