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Spotfire Ideas Portal
Status Future Consideration
Product Spotfire
Categories Data Access
Created by Guest
Created on Oct 19, 2018

Active Directory - Connector / Extension

A connector/extension to be able to fetch data from Active Directory (Users, Groups, Computers, Printers and so on) would be a great feature. Could TIBCO integrate this natively in the Spotfire Analyst?

Thank you.

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  • Guest
    Reply
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    Jan 14, 2019

    Christian, thank you for sharing the steps. Setting the changes you described would still require an export to a .csv.

    I am looking for a connector that could read directly from Active Directory, without any dump file.

    I hope TIBCO can have a look at this.

  • Guest
    Reply
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    Nov 27, 2018

    Hi, OK so from what I can see you are self imposing a technical limitation where there isn't one. To me that is not a good argument for a new feature request.

    Having said that I understand you may not have control of your Spotfire environment to dictate how data can be accessed. So let's assume that your Spotfire Administrator will not allow you to use Information Links (which run on the Spotfire Server) and that you must use Data Connectors (which run on Web Player), which I think it's what you are saying. If that's the situation then there are still plenty of options to get around your problem. I am not aware of any specific Data Connectors which let you read CSV files directly but you could easily load the CSV file on a database like Oracle and then use the Oracle Data Connector to access it from Web Player. This shouldn't need to be a complicated process, you could simply use an external table definition which will avoid having to reload the data when the CSV changes. Most Data Connectors technologies will allow you to implement a similar concept as the external table in Oracle. But the easiest solution really is to simply drop your AD CSV extract into your Spotfire DXP. When you drop text, CSV, XLS, etc files in the Spotfire Client this data is then read on demand by Web Player not the Spotfire Server. There are some config changes that you need to do to have this work on Web Player Server, but they are not too complicated:

    1) When adding the CSV file to the Spotfire Client you should use a UNC path not a mapped drive (ie \\server\share\file_name.csv) as the server will not be able to see any mapped drives yo have in your PC when you are building the report

    2) The Web Player identity the web player worker runs as should have access to the file you added on 1) as that's what Web Player will use when trying to read the file

    3) The network share UNC path (i.e. \\server\share) should be added to the AllowedFilePaths property on the Spotfire.Dxp.Worker.Host.exe.config config file or AllowAllFilePaths should be set to True on that config file. 

  • Guest
    Reply
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    Nov 24, 2018
    Christian, Thanks for your reply. Having this done with PowerShell is not problem indeed. Having this exported to the .csv is the issue. The current Web Player configuration we have only support embedded data for data that is not fetched from an information link.
  • Guest
    Reply
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    Oct 23, 2018

    I see how this could be useful but I think there are plenty workarounds out there. Personally I would recommend using Powershell since it's a Microsoft product so you have an implied guarantee that they will keep it updated and supported. Google what you want you want to do, there are plenty examples on the Web. It's also trivial to output data as CSV is Powershell so you can easily have Powershell script that outputs your AD data as a CSV file so you can then load it somewhere or even directly on a Spotfire report.