Embedded content widgets show information from other websites in a dashboard widget. They're similar to the Web Slides in briefings, except the embedded content is inside of a small dashboard widget rather than as a full briefing slide.

Adding an Embedded Content Widget

You can add an embedded content widget from the “add widget” menu.

Then, just paste in the URL of the webpage or image that you want to see on your dashboard.

Spider Impact will then show that website or image in a resizable widget.

Example: Power BI Reports

Embedded content widgets are best explained with an example. To show a Power BI report in a Spider Impact embedded content widget, we'll first go to Power BI, click File, then Embed report, and then choose either "Website or portal" or "Publish to web (public)". Most of the time you'll want to choose the "Publish to web (public)" option so that anyone who views your Spider Impact dashboard can see the Power BI content. But, if you want to require people to be logged into Power BI before they can see the content, choose "Website or portal".

This will give you a URL that is made for embedding Power BI content in other apps like Spider Impact. The process of getting an embedding URL is going to be different for every app, but the general idea is that the URL we're getting from Power BI is specifically intended for embedding. Just to test out the URL, we'll paste it into a web browser to make sure it shows the Power BI report correctly.

The URL is working, so we'll use it to create a Spider Impact embedded content widget.

And once we're done, our dashboard looks like this:

Note, however, that if we had created the Power BI embed URL by choosing "Website or portal", our dashboard will look like this whenever you're not logged into Power BI.

Sites That Prevent Embedding

It’s important to note that many commercial websites intentionally prevent themselves from being displayed in other websites. Other sites require setting cookies, which don't work with embedded content. Because of this, embedded content widgets work best for content that is designed to be embedded. It's best to think of this as a widget for showing content meant for sharing, not for embedding any website on the internet.

For example, here’s the “Embed a map” tab in google maps.

When we copy and paste that code, we get this:

<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=..."
width="600" height="450" frameborder="0" style="border:0"
allowfullscreen></iframe>

We only want the URL, though, so this part is all we want to paste into the embedded content widget.

https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=...

If, however, we went to the “Send a link” tab in google maps, we’d get a different URL that isn’t designed to be embedded.

When we paste that URL into the embedded content widget, Spider Impact will show an error that looks like this.

Finally, it’s important to note that any URL you use has to be HTTPS, not HTTP. Spider Impact is a secure site, and web browsers prevent insecure content from being displayed in secure sites.

Disabling Embedded Content Validation

As you can see, there's a lot that can prevent a web page from showing up inside of Spider Impact. We do our best, however, to explain what's going wrong when it doesn't work. Whenever you paste a URL into an embedded content widget, we check to make sure that the content can be displayed on your dashboard.

There are some situations, however, where Spider Impact can say that you're not authorized to embed a page when you really are. For example, if you're hosing Spider Impact on your own servers (or if you use a VPN or single sign-on), it's possible that the Spider Impact server is being blocked from seeing a page even though you are not. If that's the case, you can turn off "Validate Embedded Dashboard Widgets & Briefing Slides" in Admin > Application Administration.