Revisiting External Charts

Posted on Updated on

A while ago I wrote about calling out to external charting libraries to produce more varied charts from within OTBI – the examples I gave were Doughnut Charts and Sankey Charts – neither of which were possible in standard OTBI.

I was asked tonight if this method still worked, so I imported an old .catalog file and was disappointed to see that the charts didn’t load. Looking in the console I could see an error as follows:

Refused to load the script '<scriptname>' because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive ...

After some googling and checking Cloud Connect it seems there was a change around the 22A release to tighten security. A helpful forum post (and Sreedharan from Oracle and Kypros from TalentTeam in particular) showed how to add additional entries to the Safe Domains.

Here’s the Oracle documentation answer:

  1. Within OTBI, click My Profile, and select Administration from the menu.
  2. Click Manage Safe Domains.
  3. Enter the domains you wish to add. I needed:
  4. Log out and in again

Hey presto, the donut chart works again:

One interesting side-note to this is that Google Charts (the 3rd party service I called out to) has been deprecated. It still works for the time being, but it’s not longer being enhanced. There are alternatives that would be worth considering if taking this further – Chart.js is one option (gallery link) and seems like it would be really quick to get running. Vega looks really interesting and their gallery is much more extensive, but might take a little more work. I’d like to have a go at the Calendar chart one day:

It might be interesting to visualise joiners/leavers and applicant volumes in this manner.

Advertisement

This entry was posted in Uncategorized.