What keeps a website from embedding in a dashboard frame?

[LindaHoxie1]

Hello,

I am creating a dashboard for my emergency managers.  There are quite a few websites that for some reason won't embed in a frame.  

Is there anyway around that?  Can anyone tell me why they won't embed?

I ended up just using the text feature and putting them in as hyperlinks, but it would look a lot nicer if they were showing as a website.

Linda

[Kanin]

Hello Linda Hoxie‌,

Are you using mixed contents between HTTP and HTTPS connections? If you are accessing your dashboard via https://..., please ensure that your embed links are also HTTPS, and vice versa. Alternatively, you can try using a relative URL such as: //www.example.com/content.html.

Regards,

Kanin

If this answer is helpful, please mark it as helpful. If this answer solved your question, please mark it as the answer to help others who have the same question.

[LindaHoxie1]

Hello Kanin,

That was a great thought.  I checked and both my dashboard and the external website are both secured connections (https).  I also tried using a relative URL, with no luck.

Thank you for helping.

Any more ideas?

Linda

[Kanin]

Hello Linda,

Is the external website publicly accessible via internet? Are there any security measures in place such as CORS that may prevent other web apps of another domain i.e. dashboard from embedding.

Also, is your dashboard hosted in ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise?

Regards,

Kanin

If this answer is helpful, please mark it as helpful. If this answer solved your question, please mark it as the answer to help others who have the same question.

[LindaHoxie1]

Hello Kanin,

Sorry so long to get back to you on this, I was working in a different department for a while and just getting back to this.  In answer to your questions;

The website is publicly accessible via the internet. 

I am not sure how to tell if CORS is in place, is there a way to tell that?

The dashboard is hosted on ArcGIS Online.

Thank you so much for your help,

Linda

[Kanin]

Hello Linda,

No worries! And thank you for your response.

CORS is short for Cross-origin resource sharing and it is a security feature where a website/web server could restrict which web domains could embed its resources. For example, if I have a server "abc.com" and I set up CORS to only allow the domain "arcgis.com" to embed my website, this means that only dashboards hosted on arcgis.com could embed my items. Say, if someone hosted their dashboard on ArcGIS Enterprise with the domain "xyz.com", they would not be able to embed my items.

With that being said, CORS is a setting on the origin side server. So if the owner of the site decides to implement this, there is not much we can do to fix the embed issue, unfortunately. To test this issue further, are all websites not embedded in your dashboard or are some still embedded-able? Could you please try adding some public sites, perhaps, esri.com, arcgis.com, or google.com, and see if that works for you.

Regards,

Kanin

If this answer is helpful, please mark it as helpful. If this answer solved your question, please mark it as the answer to help others who have the same question.

[LindaHoxie1]

Hi Kanin,

Thank you so much for explaining that for me, it really helps.  I have found other solutions to the websites that won't embed and have a lot of them embedded.  It really works well.

I appreciate all your help and hope that this helps others in the future!

My best to you, I hope you and yours stay well,

Linda