Additional Considerations for Embedded Business Intelligence

Generally you want to hide the BI Portal banner, since the embedding application usually has its own banner. If you only want to embed a single BI Portal page you can also choose to disable the BI Portal Navigation bar from the ribbon in Portal Designer. If you have a multi-page portal you should leave the navigation bar enabled and consider styling the portal page tabs with a custom CSS file, as explained below. When the navigation bar is shown you also have a choice to show or hide the New Page icon to users who have the Customize Portal privilege.

Generally speaking you want the embedded BI application and the content it is hosting to appear like a single, well styled, application. WebFOCUS has excellent re branding capabilities to address this requirement. There are two aspects to styling that you need to consider:

• Styling the content (for example, reports, charts, and so on) rendered by the portal.
• Styling the portal chrome that appears around the content.

You can style the content to match your embedding requirements by developing a custom WebFOCUS stylesheet and selecting it from the Theme button in the InfoAssist+ ribbon.

You can also use the BI Portal Dynamic Styling option to specify a custom stylesheet override to all the portal content. The embedded BI demo application uses this approach, as shown in the following image.

You can also create a custom CSS theme to style things like the panel borders, title bar text, portal page tab appearance, and even images like the easy selector Add Content or New Page icons. Store your custom CSS theme in the repository and select if from the Portal Theme Files UI, which is accessible by clicking the Theme button on the ribbon in Portal Designer, as shown in the following image.

If you plan to embed responsive BI Portal content in your application you need to enable the Broadcast height for embedding option, on the portal properties panel in Portal Designer, as shown in the following image.

This option causes the portal to broadcast JavaScript events that return the height (in pixels) that the hosting iframe should be reset to in order for the portal content to fit without extra space or an inner scrollbar.

If the portal is only used in iframe embedding scenarios you can leave the Target Origin set to *. If the portal will be used in multiple scenarios and you want to limit the broadcast messages to only a single application you can set Target Origin to a specific host. For example:

http://embeddinghost.domain.com

You then need to modify your embedding application to listen for the following two events:

• portal_loaded. This event is broadcast once the portal page has loaded
• height_changed. This event is broadcast each time the portal page height changes

The following is an example which you will find in the embedded BI demo application on line 818 in embeddemo/js/bip-page-ext.js:

/* Add Message Listener */ 
window.addEventListener('message', function(e) { 

var data; 

if (typeof e.data === 'string') 
data = JSON.parse(e.data); 
else 
data = e.data; 

var pageType = typeof data.portal_path !== 'undefined' ? 'portal' : 'page'; 
console.log(data, pageType, data.page_path); 
var portalNode = pageType == 'portal' ? getPortalNode(data.portal_path, 'path') : getPortalNode(data.page_path, 'path'); 

if (data) { 
var message_name = data["message_name"]; 

if (message_name == "height_changed"){ 
if (pageType == "portal" && portalNode.loaded) 
$('#'+portalNode.id).parent().height( parseInt(data["portal_height"]) ); 
else 
$('#'+portalNode.id).parent().height( parseInt(data["page_height"]) ); 
} 
else if (message_name == "portal_loaded"){ 
portalNode.loaded = true; 
$('#'+portalNode.id).parent().height( parseInt(data["portal_height"]) ); 
} 
} 
window.scrollTo(0,0); 
}); 
} 
}

In general there is no requirement to enable the Alternate security zone to support embedded BI deployments. If it is not required, then the Alternate zone should remain disabled because it does complicate troubleshooting of trusted ticket authentication configurations. The guidelines in this section are provided to assist users that will need to enable the Alternate zone while supporting trusted ticket authentication.

When enabled, WebFOCUS will first determine if a request should be processed by the Alternate zone configuration. By default, the Alternate zone is configured to capture requests made to 127.0.0.1, 0:0:0:0:0:0:1, and ::1. As a result, if you are testing a same origin (single web host) configuration, then your trusted ticket request may be processed by the Alternate zone. In this case you must enable Trusted Ticket Authentication on the Alternate zone in addition to on your Default zone.

You can enable and configure the Alternate zone to process trusted ticket requests in cross-origin (dual web host) configurations, but there is no requirement to do so. If you want to configure this, simply enable Trusted Ticket Authentication on the Alternate zone and add the IP address of the host where your embedded BI application resides.