Implementing Embedded Business Intelligence in Same Origin and Cross-Origin Scenarios

Another important consideration is the deployment topology, which relates to where the embedded application and WebFOCUS reside. Often times both are deployed on or behind a single web host. This includes when both are deployed on the same application server (as depicted by Case 1 in the following diagram) and when they are deployed on different servers, but accessed from a single web server or load balancer (Case 2). In addition, a proxy method can also be used (as depicted by Case 3 in the following diagram), where the browser communicates to a proxy, which acts as an intermediary to WebFOCUS.

These are referred to as same origin scenarios.

At times it may be necessary for the user to access the embedded application and WebFOCUS from different web hosts as depicted by Case 4 in this diagram. This is referred to as a cross-origin scenario. Due to security controls built into modern web browsers, you will need to configure the WebFOCUS iframe embedding and Cross-Origin Request Sharing (CORS) features before the embedded BI demo application can be used in a cross-origin scenario. For more information on configuring and using cross-origin settings in WebFOCUS, see the WebFOCUS Security and Administration content.

Other considerations for embedded BI include branding/rebranding and responsive web design. The embedded BI demo application shows how you can restyle WebFOCUS content and BI Portal pages so that they blend in visually with the host application in order to provide an improved user experience. The sample BI Portals that are included with the demo have responsive page layouts, which require the hosting iframe height to be dynamically adjusted as required by the portal page. This can be accomplished by setting the Broadcast height for embedding option in the BI Portals and adding an event listener to the embedded BI demo.

As you can see, WebFOCUS provides robust support for embedded BI. This enables customers to extend commercial and custom web applications with the extensive business intelligence and analytics capabilities available in WebFOCUS with minimal effort and with an exceptional user experience.