Connecting to Internet from TIBCO Cloud Spotfire Webplayer

[Richard Barthel]

Hi all -

 

I'm trying to connect my dashboard hosted on the TIBCO Cloud Spotfire Webplayer to a datasource on Google Sheets. I have tried several different methods but I have not been successful.

 

Connect to Google Sheets via Google BigQuery : when directly referencing a Google Sheets datasource in Google BigQuery, the OAuth2 token scope must extend to Google Sheets/Google Drive. Unfortunately, the OAuth2 scope requested by Spotfire and granted by Google is only for Google BigQuery and does not extend to Google Sheets (or Google Drive). Therefore, I must periodicallythe query and store the result on GCP in order to fetch the data. Another disadvantage is that I am required to login to Google everytime I (or my customers) open the dashboard. This option is not acceptable. (similar problem in Tableau)

Query Google Sheets API via TERR : I am able to successfully query when using the Spotfire analyst client, but not when I deploy the dashboard to the webplayer. After getting an answer on this forum, I found out there are outbound connection limitations when hosting on the TIBCO Cloud. I therefore cannot connect to my API from the Webplayer, and this option is not acceptable. (Link to answer from A. Lundberg)

Periodically query Google Sheets and dump to SBDF, upload to TIBCO Cloud Library : I thought I could periodically have a service running to query Google Sheets and using the Java SBDF library to write the information to an SBDF (Spotfire Binary Data Format) file and use the Spotfire Web Services API /Library REST API to push the file to the TIBCO Cloud Spotfire Library and have it read by the dashboard on-demand. After working with the TIBCO help team, I discovered that this feature is not available for TIBCO Cloud Spotfire. This is not documented anywhere.This option is not acceptable.

 

 

I've exhausted all my ideas and I don't understand why it's so difficult to get live data into TIBCO Cloud Spotfire. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can connect these two services to pull live data into my dashboard I'm even open to moving to another cloud service provider into other to get this working.

Thanks,

Richard

[Khushboo Rabadia]

Unfortunately, this is not feasible with out of box functionality. You can try this approach of triggering automation job from local analyst i.e. say everyday at 7am a powershell script can be triggered which can open analyst and run this automation job locally which can fetchdata in a datatable from google sheets using TERR datafunctionor using custom odbc connector (https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/gsheets-odbc-spotfire.rst) or using TDV (Tibco data virtualization)connector (TDV can import google sheets) and then export datatable to sbdf using automation task. I have not tested this scripting tool for cloud but it works for on prem, you can check with creator of this tool on below community page.

https://community.spotfire.com/wiki/automating-tibco-spotfire-scripting-tools

https://community.spotfire.com/wiki/tibco-spotfire-analyst-command-line-parameter-reference

Other than that you can raise idea in ideas portal (https://ideas.tibco.com/) or check with our Professional Services team (spotfireconsulting@tibco.com) for any customization around this if feasible.