I spent the last couple months finalising a reporting section on my application. It is all very basic but essentially my application filters into organisations so if certain users is parts of an organisation they only see that organisations data.
In the reporting section I have repeating groups that filter information for what the user chooses from a filter I’ve made it populates that repeating group and then the user can use a plug-in to download that to PDF.
My question, is it possible to use a third party software like klipfolio BI tool ( or something similar)and integrate it into my application so users can build their own reports and not have fixed reports which I have developed for the user’s.
Now obviously my application is a saas model so if it ever was possible to integrate a data visualisation solution the solution would need to know what user is logged in so it could give them their organisation’s data if that makes sense.
The business intelligence reporting software that is out there on the market looks so good and I feel it would really benefit users that use my application If I could integrate something which is a lot more advanced than what I have built.
I was wondering if anyone out there has ever had any experience with integrating a 3rd party data visualisation reporting tool into their application?
I’m not overly advanced in bubble so any advice would be greatly appreciated from this fantastic bubble community.
I don’t know whether there are ways to do this with Bubble or not. You can definitely send Bubble’s data to a 3rd party tool. You could have users log directly into that tool and manipulate the data from a web-enabled BI tool.
Integrating into your site becomes more challenging though, for 3 reasons:
I’m not sure how you’d manage Single Sign On (SSO) where the user on your site can, essentially, sign into the BI tool automatically by being signed into your site.
You’d need to embed the BI tool into your site and it sounds like you’d want it to be white-labeled. Some BI tools offer this, but it’s often very expensive to so do. For example, many of the well known BI tools start at $100k to integrate into a 3rd party site and the pricing goes up from there based on the number of customers you have using the tool. I think most/all of the BI tools that sell to enterprises have a pricing model like this. Of course, there might be a few that offer a pricing model that’s much more affordable, especially those that are targeting small businesses or perhaps there are even some who primarily look to have their tools embedded into websites.
Even if you can get it embedded, most BI tools are overkill for what most users want. Many BI tools still require days of training to set-up your own report. There are likely some that could work, but I’d be sure to test the usability of them with your users before moving forward.
I would imagine there’s a solution here if you really dig into it, but I suspect there’s a lot of work that’d go into figure out a set-up that works from a product, usability, and budget POV.
Anyone else have insights here? Know any specific BI tools that are embeddable, usable, and affordable?
Hey @timgarrett111 I’ve been looking at PDF Generator and trying to get a way to make it work. It works through an API and allows users to create their own reports. I’m still at very early stages in trying to make it work, but maybe if you have more API experience than me, you’ll have more luck.
If you do make some headway let me know! It looks pretty slick from a reporting standpoint, not sure about heavy-lifting BI though.
Thank you so much for your detailed reply I read a lot of your input on the bubble forum and yourself and a few others are an integral part of why bubble is so good due to the fact of what you donate to this community.
After reading your 3rd point it’s made up my mind that integrating a bi tool is definitely not the right way to go for me anyway.
@kirk
Unfortunately I do not have much API experience whatsoever. Generating PDFs I used the Zerocode plug-in which is turning out to be fantastic for me anyway.
