Embedding Dashboards for Analytics with the JavaScript SDK

Bold BI Embedded is a powerful BI and analytics solution that allows you to quickly embed interactive dashboards into business applications, preventing you from having to build a BI solution on your own. It can easily be customized, giving you complete control.

Bold BI Embedded provides JavaScript SDK support for embedding enterprise-grade dashboards that make data visualization more powerful while allowing you to analyze data in your own environment. In this blog post, we will discuss the Bold BI Embedded SDK and how it improves business applications with its embedding and customization features.

Why Bold BI Embedded SDK?

The Bold BI Embedded SDK is a JavaScript library that allows you to include a script along with a Bold BI instance to easily embed dashboards into your web application in a secure manner. For example, say you run an e-commerce business, and you want to understand customer purchasing patterns based on key metrics. Unfortunately, you have no time to build analytical software on your own. The Bold BI Embedded SDK tackles this situation by simplifying the context-switching between business and analytics applications. It comes with native client-side JavaScript components that can be customized to match your application.

Authenticating applications

The Bold BI server authenticates the embedding application with an authorization server by getting requests with an e-mail, an embed secret, a dashboard ID, and a path with an embed signature to validate the embedding application and send a response through an access token to connect with the Bold BI server.

Bold BI SDK features

Along with embedding dashboards, the Bold BI Embedded SDK provides various customizations and features. I’ll discuss each of the following in detail:

• Embedded widgets
• Dashboard customization
• Filters
• Data bindings
• Events
• User interaction

Embedded widgets

Bold BI Embedded allows you to embed widgets in your application, just like you can embed dashboards.

Dashboard customization

The Bold BI Embedded SDK provides many customization options for dashboard monitoring and team collaboration with business stakeholders.

Dashboard layout customization

You can customize your dashboards with dashboard headers and dashboard refreshing. You can also show or hide these customized dashboards.

Widget layout customization

You can customize your widgets by viewing them in maximized mode and applying data filters. You can also show or hide the customized widgets.

Theme customization

You can view the dashboard using light and dark themes.

Exporting

You can export the dashboard’s current view to Excel, image, and PDF formats.

Filters

You can apply filters to dashboards in two ways:

External Filters

You can directly create filter queries for widgets to view specific types of data across a dashboard.

User-Based Filter

You can create user-based filters for your dashboard, where, based on a logged-in user, a filter will be applied, showing only that user’s data. For example, a CEO can see all their employees’ details when logged in. Meanwhile, using the same dashboard, each employee will see only their own data when logged in.

Data bindings

You can bind data with two effective functionalities:

Dynamic connection strings

You can switch the connection string for your dashboard using a dynamic connection string feature. Upon having databases with the same schema, you can change the connection string of the dashboard with a few configuration steps. For example, if you have a database for each employee in your company, and you want to view the dashboard of each employee, instead of creating new dashboards for every employee, you could just create a single dashboard and change the connection string dynamically.

Auto-refreshing

You can configure an auto-refresh option for your dashboard to see up-to-date data by setting the refresh to occur within specific intervals.

Events

Bold BI Embedded’s SDK provides various events so you can control your dashboard on your own.

User Interaction

You can pass parameters to a dashboard by adding them to the dashboard URL. When initially loading, the dashboard will apply a filter based on the parameters passed with the Bold BI Embedded instance.

You can check out all Bold BI Embedded’s customization features in our sample browser.

Conclusion

Embedded BI is a widely preferred analytics solution among business users who would like to embed analytics in their business applications. Refer to our documentation for a simple example of how to use the Bold BI wrapper inside your application to embed a dashboard.

I hope this article explained the importance of the JavaScript SDK for dashboard and analytics embedding using Bold BI Embedded. If you have any questions on this blog, please feel free to post them in the following comment section. To get started with Bold BI, please request a free 30-minute demo with our experts to discuss creating dashboards and any other features you would like to learn more about. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on May 12, 2020.