Embed Pinboard or visualization

Learn how to embed a visualization or Pinboard in your own Web page.

This page explains, through an example, how to embed either a ThoughtSpot visualization (table or chart) or a ThoughtSpot Pinboard from ThoughtSpot in your own static Web page, portal, or application.

To build this sample, you must have access to a text editor and a ThoughtSpot instance with a visualization. Experience working with Javascript also helps.

Get the link

You can get the link for an entire Pinboard, or single visualization

This procedure assumes the Pinboard with the visualization you want to embed already exists.

Log in to ThoughtSpot from a browser.
Navigate to a visualization on the Pinboard tab.
Open a Pinboard.
Copy the URL:
- Pinboard embedding: click the More menu at the level of the Pinboard, , and select [-] Copy embed link.
  
  The format for the link is:
```
 <protocol>:<host>:<port>/#/embed/viz/<pinboardID>
```
- Vizualization embedding: click the More menu on the visual you plan to embed, , and select [-] Copy embed link.
  
  The format for the link is:
```
  <protocol>:<host>:<port>/#/embed/viz/<pinboardID>/<vizualizationId>
```

Edit the test.html file

You must edit the page in your application or web page where you want to embed a ThoughtSpot pinboard or visualization. For this example, you can get a copy of the test.html file.

Create an empty directory called test.
Save the test.html file to the test directory.
Download the ThoughtSpot JavaScript library.
Place the Javascript library in an api directory co-located with the test.html file.
Edit the test.html file in your favorite editor.

Scroll down to the Variables section (about line 37).

Here are the fields in the test.html file you must edit.

 var protocol = "THOUGHTSPOT_PROTOCOL";
 var hostPort = "HOST_PORT";   

 var pinboardId = "PINBOARD_ID";
 var vizualizationId = "VIZUALIZATON_ID";

Edit each variable in the section and replace it with the IDs you copied from the pinboard.

For example, your URL may look similar to the following:

http://172.18.202.35:8088/#/embed/viz/061457a2-27bc-43a9-9754-0cd873691bf0/9985fccf-b28d-4262-b54b-29619a38348e

This is a link copied from an individual visualization, the result in the file is:
```
 var protocol = "http";
 var hostPort = "172.18.202.35:8088";   

 var pinboardId = "061457a2-27bc-43a9-9754-0cd873691bf0";
 var vizualizationId = "9985fccf-b28d-4262-b54b-29619a38348e";
```
The protocol (http or https) of your client and your ThoughtSpot instance should match. You can use this identifier in the next part.
Save your changes and close the test.html file.

Enable CORS for your client domain

You must work with ThoughtSpot support to enable CORS between your client application domain and the ThoughtSpot domain. If you don’t do this, you will receive an error message when test.html attempts to load the embedded objects.

The test infrastructure uses Python’s simplehttpserver, which runs by default as localhost:8000. ThoughtSpot support must have this information. You can also copy the test directory to an existing web server. If you do this, you must DNS for the server when you contact Support.

Test the example page

You are almost ready to view your embedded pinboard and visualization. The fastest way to run a webserver and test the code is using Python’s simplehttpserver. If you have Python on your system you already have the simplehttpserver.

Log in to ThoughtSpot.

In production, you would have added authentication code to your client. You haven’t done that with this system. So, before you test, you must login to the ThoughtSpot. Successfully logging in causes the system to create a session and an authentication key. Your browser has this information and so when you load the test.html page in another tab, you won’t need to authenticate again.
Change to your test directory.
Start the simplehttpserver web server.
```
  python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000
```
Open your browser’s Developer tools.
Navigate to the test page in your browser.

http://localhost:8000/test.html

See if your Pinboard or visualization appears in the browser window.

Check the browser console.

On success, the console reports a message similar to the following:

 test.html:60 Initialization successful.
 test.html:113 http://172.18.202.35:8088/#/embed/viz/061457a2-27bc-43a9-9754-0cd873691bf0
 test.html:129 http://172.18.202.35:8088/#/embed/viz/061457a2-27bc-43a9-9754-0cd873691bf0/9985fccf-b28d-4262-b54b-29619a38348e

Troubleshooting embeds

If your embeds don’t load, open the developer tools on your browser, and look for errors in the page loading, usually on the Console tab.

You may see an error similar to the following:

No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource.

This occurs when the cross domain (CORS) setting is incorrect on your ThoughtSpot cluster. Contact ThoughtSpot Support for more help.