External Content
External Content component shows content from another webpage in the dashboards. For example Microsoft Sharepoint or other content management systems can be integrated into QPR ProcessAnalyzer. The External Content component uses the HTML iframe element to embed the website.
The properties of the External Content component can be opened when the dashboard is in the Add component mode.
External Content URL
External content URL defines the URL of the external page you want to embed. You can also use a relative path (e.g. "/examples/test.html"), if the page you want to embed is accessible by the same protocol, host, and port.
Passing Variables in Url
You can pass context variable values in the iframe url using the variable tags. The variables can be configured on the Variables tab of the External Component properties. Example:
http(s)://SERVERNAME/ExternalPresentationObjects/<#variableName>
- When an effective dashboard variable value is changed, the external page url changes to reflect the up-to-date variable values. If the changed variable tag appears after the anchor (#) in the url, the web page is not reloaded.
- If there is an equals sign (=) immediately before the tag, the value is url component encoded, because it's assumed to be a url parameter value. Otherwise, no encoding is applied and the variable value is placed to the url as such.
- Variables can contain any type of data and the values are converted to strings when placed in the url. If the url has a tag and the corresponding variable does not exist, the tag is replaced with an empty value.
Content-Security-Policy Restrictions
By default, only websites from the same origin than QPR ProcessAnalyzer can be embedded. This is restricted by the Content-Security-Policy (CSP) HTTP header's child-src and frame-src directives.
Example CSP to allow embedding the https://google.com website to QPR ProcessAnalyzer:
default-src 'none';script-src 'self';style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline';img-src 'self' data: blob:;connect-src 'self';font-src 'self' data:;manifest-src 'self';child-src 'self' https://google.com/;frame-src 'self' https://google.com/;object-src 'none';frame-ancestors 'self'; form-action 'none';base-uri 'none';worker-src blob:;
More information how to change the CSP setting in Security Hardening.
Web Browser Security Considerations
Some websites prevent themselves to be embedded into other websites using iframe. In those cases, the component will be left blank (in Chrome and Firefox) or there may be an error message "This content cannot be displayed in a frame". The way to workaround the issue is to have X-Frame-Options HTTP response header changed in the embedded website (more information: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-Frame-Options).