Third-party-reporting Tools - Tracking Products Purchased - reporting-services

I am looking for a third party application to report on transactions on an e-commerce site. We are looking to report on which product was purchased and the transaction amount. Each product on our site is owned by a different vendor and they would like to be able to track the history of consumer purchases of their product (as they earn money on each purchase). It would be ideal if they could have had their own login credentials that only provide them access to see their reports.
Our application uses authorize.net as a payment gateway.

Our new ActiveReports Server product includes multi-tenant support. Basically you can programmatically take over authentication by implementing a simple interface (see ISecurityProvider). This is how you can give a special login to each of your vendors. If you already have a login for your vendors (e.g. for a public vendor site) you can even integrate with that using the ISecurityProvider to give your vendors a single-sign-on experience.
In the documentation here it explains how to configure your SecurityProvider implementation to handle authentication and how to use "Security Filters" to filter records transparently based on the logged in user. The Security Filter is how you would make sure that the vendor sees only his history.
ActiveReports Server also includes a web browser-based drag & drop ad hoc report designer powered by automatically generated and fully customizable logical data models that protect business users from underlying technical details.
Scott Willeke
Product Manager | ActiveReports Server
GrapeCity inc.

Related

Synchronization across different systems

I have 2 systems let's call them i and j. Each have it's own database.
Each have a registration page, where a user is inserted in a user table.
What is the best way to synchronize both tables, where if any user registers at system i it will be also registered at system j.
Notes:
I cannot read from each other databases directly.
I can do small changes in the code if needed and it will not affect the system performance or natural behavior.
I can create API's for both systems if needed.
I can add any tables or fields if needed.
I can create any cron jobs unless it will affect the performance of the system or server.
I'm using cPanel.
Technologies:
MySQL
PHP
REST API's
The fact that you list cpanel as a technology shows you're working with an inflexible budget hosting vendor. So it's unlikely they'll cooperate in setting up background tasks (cron jobs) to merge your user tables behind the scenes. (cpanel isn't a technology: it's a system administration user interface provided by hosting vendors who don't trust their customers' skills.)
So. you should design and implement a REST API in the code of both your apps to perform user registration and authentication tasks. You didn't show us the details of your app, so it's hard to design it for you. Still it seems likely you'll have to implement these operations:
PUT user
DELETE user
GET user
POST user to validate a user's password, etc. (Don't use GET to pass secret information: GET request parameters go into server logs.)
PATCH to update details of a user.
If you get the API working, whenever you create/retrieve/update/delete user information in one app, you'll use the API to change it in the other.
Your best bet would be to create a third app just for user management, and have both your existing apps use it. That way you're sure to have one coherent source of truth about users. But you can do it just within two apps.

Azure APIM publisher access control

we have a common APIM setup where developer publishes and subscribes products. Can we restrict certain developers to only publish APIs under specific product. We don't want a developer tampering with the product published by another developer. I found a document where we can restrict the visibility from a subscribers perspective link to doc
Can a similar access control can be done for a publishers?
Look into ARM custom roles: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/custom-roles You should be able to create RBAC rules for your developers scoping access only to a certain products, since API membership in product is controlled by /products/{pid}/apis/{aid}
There is a concept called "groups" provided by azure, which will help us to group users and give privileges based on the roles(RBAC). Groups are further divided into two types
1.Default
2.Custom
A specific group of users can be given permissions edit to a specific product and only read some other product.
For Further reference follow the link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-howto-create-groups

How to get Amazon product information through API

I am looking for a way how to get Amazon product information through API. I found some articles how to get products data:
Amazon Product API Exploration: Let’s Build a Product Searcher
Querying Amazon's product details with the Amazon Product Advertising API
If I understand it correctly, I need access to Amazon Product Advertising API. I signed up as Amazon associate, but I wasn't approved, and thus I am not able to join Amazon Product Advertising API.
I messaged Amazon support and got this response:
This is the Amazon Associates team responding to your email.
Registration for Product Advertising API is only available to Associates who have received final acceptance into the Associates Program and are in an Open status. You are unable to join because your application is still pending or in a Pending status. PA-API is only for approved members or those in an Open status. This means that when the Applications team review your application and website(s), if your application is placed into an Open status, you will be automatically eligible for API access.
Our Applications team will review your application and website(s) after you have earned at least three (3) qualifying referral sales through your Associate Product Links. Please note, three (3) qualifying referrals means three separate orders and multiple items within an order do not qualify. Applications will be reviewed shortly after you’ve referred your third qualifying sale to Amazon.com.
To begin developing your website(s) and posting on social media, you've been granted access to Associate Product Linking tools in Associates Central (affiliate.program.amazon.com) under the Product Linking tab and Site Stripe (located at Amazon.com). Use these tools to generate at least three (3) qualified referral sales to initiate your final review. Until your application is reviewed. With the access to Associates Central, you have the opportunity to create product links, banners, or native ads to add to your website and start earning money right away.
If your website requires the use of PA-API, you would need to contact them directly to see what other options would be available, or use our other Product Linking tools on a different website or social media site(s).
I am wondering, how can I get access to amazon product information if I am not amazon seller?
Amazon recently changed their affiliate policy regarding API access. They want you to have three affiliate link transactions within 180 days to be in good standing. They will need to conduct a review of your affiliate site. Until then, the API keys will only be good for generating product links.

Can Tableau be used in customer-facing and SaaS web applications?

I was hoping someone could help me answer a couple of questions regarding Tableau. I am not as familiar with the platform, but I have a client who is looking for a reporting/analytics/data visualization platform that they could use for many of the internal apps (for their employees) and external (customer facing internet with login) applications.
The driver is that each of their internal teams has used many disparate technologies such as SSRS, Crystal, custom ASP.NET controls (Kendo/Telerik, etc), but now they have the opportunity to choose a common platform that could serve most/all of the future reporting and data visualization needs for enterprise and customer facing solutions.
They are looking for a platform that provides everything from simple grids with basic filter/sort/group, all the way to rich charting and ad-hoc reporting with slicing and dicing of data.
They will not always be creating dashboards in these apps since they are customer-facing, but they may want to have dashboards for internal (intranet) apps. They will definitely want the ability to build true internal BI dashboards to report on data from all these online apps across all customers, to whom they provide their SaaS/customer-facing web apps.
One of our main concerns revolves around security of data, as some of these customer-facing web apps are multi-tenant, so we'd need to ensure that data is always filtered by the client tenant id. Also we have a very customized security model, with data driven roles, permissions that may prevent showing certain types of data (e.g. SSN, Salary, etc) etc.
Does Tableau fits this model, can it meet most/all of these requirements, or is it meant more for internal data?
It should be quite possible by setting up a reverse proxy that would front end your multi tenant web application. There is a document on how to setup Apache as reverse proxy with Tableau with/without SSL.
I am familiar with how to configure Apache as reverse proxy and so here are the details with Apache Web server on how to setup reverse proxy rules.
There may be some documentation for front ending with IIS/Nginx so you should do some googling by yourself.
You need to harden your webserver configuration by limiting access from the external firewall to read only pages and the internal user can access allpages. Since you mentioned that the external users are allowed access to readonly pages, I presume all the requests from external requests will be only GET requests and a few PUT/POST requests when users choose to use filters. So you can block external users from any request except GET. Exceptions should be made for the pages that allow applying filters and grouping.
In your mutitenant application make sure you refer to the tableau URL's by the apache server url that is exposed to the outside world. If any url not configured in apache is used, users will recieve a access denied error. You need to create a role that has readonly access to tableau pages for external users. To address mulitenancy you need to set a cookie or something to identify the tenant and something similar to identify the user. To filter SSN and some more information you can use mod_proxy_html which filters content. You can also use mod_security module of Apache to block SSNs and Credit Card Numbers.
References:
Configuring Apache Server as Proxy with Tableau
Apache mod Proxy documentation
Blocking POST requests
mod_security FAQs
Yes to most of your questions -- with just a little fine print.
First remember Tableau is primarily about visualizing data, so it is great for publishing readonly interactive views of data. If you want allow end users to edit data, you'll have to do that by another means. Fortunately, the Tableau JavaScript API lets you interact closely with Tableau with your custom Javascript code. So if your needs are mostly about visualization, but want want to be able to trigger some custom code to modify data in some of your apps, you should be fine. But Tableau is not designed for creating custom CRUD apps as a rule.
The great thing about Tableau server is that many people can learn to use it and publish their own visualizations -- even if they don't know how to program. That doesn't mean they will win visualization design awards the first time, or that they shouldn't learn something about how databases work if they want have good performance. But it does mean the people that know their data best can learn to design and publish their own visualizations without having to wait three months on a backlog queue so the one IT guy can change the color of a button or add a field. It still would be good to get good system, database and visualization folks to help train, organize data, set governance and security rules, optimize, etc, but business users can learn to be the ones with hands on control over how their information is presented. That's a good thing.
The security question has several moving parts, and usually there are usually good answers from Tableau depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Tableau server does support multi-tenancy using sites. There is fairly flexible permissions and group policy system. It can use SAML for authentication, and has several features providing access to specific to the user/tenant. It works with almost every database, and you can in some cases push your security enforcement to the database server -- SQL server for instance. There is a trusted ticket feature where you can defer some authorization decisions to another server, say a web portal server. Useful when Tableau visualizations are embedded in some other web page.
Most security use cases can be supported out of the box, but there are some complex custom access control situations that are tricky to implement currently in Tableau server. Nothing you've listed sounds out of the normal swim lane, but the only way to know whether your security model is too complex is to dive into the details. Hopefully they will release a custom access control API for users who want to extend it.
At the high level, you sure can use Tableau to build customer-facing dashboards. You can quickly build and deploy those and as others mentioned, you can iFrame them with Javascript APIs, you can customize most of it. But it doesn't provide complete flexibility for user interaction, which you can if you use other technologies. Other options include hand coding framework and then using charting applications.
For simple dashboards, Tableau would be the obvious choice if you have already bought core-licenses. But when looking at what's going on in the industry, Tableau will not be able to fulfill all needs.
If using Tableau
1. Building Charts/Tables/Visualization is a super simple, efficient way.
2. You can expose low grained data to customers, because of Tableau's propitiatory columnar database engine, you can potentially expose millions of records via a dashboard.
3. You can use Tableau's security and access control mechanism.
4. As other user mentioned, you can use trusted ticketing mechanism to integrate easily with other applications (portals etc).
Challenges with Tableau approach.
1. If you have late arriving transactions (in Internet world it's so common to mark a click as fraudulent after few days) with late arriving transactions, you have to have full refresh the extracts, which means if you are showing say 13 months worth of data, you have refresh it all, all the time. Now with bigData, business needs all data all the time, which means you would end up extracting millions of records, throughout the day.
2. Very little flexibility in user interactions, like menus,drop downs etc. you have to work with what's been provided by Tableau.
3. If you have multiple charts on same dashboard page, not so user friendly way to download underlying data.
4. Many other challenges, in laying out visualizations on dashboard page, as there is no easy way to control canvas with pixel control, white spaces etc.
You should be very careful, after analyzing your use case, whether Tableau would be the right product before you invest in it.
Tableau's primary power comes from its desktop tool for data visualization/exploration and not from pre-built dashboards.
Best of luck.
Since Tableau public is also based on Tableau, I assume that you can put your dashboards in public using your own Tableau infrastructure.

Is it possible to store SharePoint users in a MySql database?

I have a customer with a very small SharePoint 2010 system where they don't need to log in and they don't have an Active Directory. I think it's always the same person logged in.
They want a workflow where they can choose a person from a list and a notification email will be sent to the person. And they want the data to be stored in a MySql database.
Is it possible to store SharePoint users in a MySql database?
Or can I build a simple MySql table with names and email addresses and then send emails to those from inside a SharePoint workflow? Will SharePoint understand that those are email addresses?
You need to setup your web application to use claims authentication and then implement a custom membership provider. There is some implementations for mysql membership providers out there:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/12301/Membership-and-Role-providers-for-MySQL
Here is an article about how to setup claims authentication with an ASP.NET membership provider:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg252020(v=office.14).aspx
Obviously you need to adapt the implementation to the MySQL Membership provider which should be easy enough.
Sorry about providing links but the ammount of steps is so big that is not suitable to be posted here.