The November 2018 release of Qlik NPrinting contains a number of enhancements to security and administration.
Within the web console, we’ve made improvements to task management. We added specific permissions around access to the task executions page. A security role can now include permissions for users to view and abort tasks. This previously had been limited to the admin role but can now be included as part of a custom role to be assigned to non-admin users.
In addition, we’ve added a new page dedicated to on-demand request management. From this view, users with the proper security role can view, abort, and delete on-demand requests made by other Qlik users running Qlik NPrinting reports in either QlikView or Qlik Sense (we’ll come back to this later!).
This helps prevent a single on-demand report from taking up too many resources, for example, an unfiltered report containing thousands of pages.
There are also several security enhancements in this release. Security for the Qlik NPrinting Messaging service (RabbitMQ) has been changed from plain text authentication to certificate usage (TLS communication).
We now support authentication for the Qlik NPrinting Designer when there is a reverse proxy in front of the Qlik NPrinting Server. Users will authenticate manually upon launching the Qlik NPrinting Designer for the first time. Cookies are collected, and the user will not have to re-authenticate until the cookies expire.
To help prevent downgrade attacks, the Qlik NPrinting proxy can use HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) header.
Finally, a security improvement that uses header X-Frame-Options and frame bursting javascript code prevents cross-frame scripting and clickjacking attacks.
And we would be remiss if we did not mention the delivery of On-Demand reporting for Qlik Sense! Technically, you can run on-demand reports with earlier versions of Qlik NPrinting, provided that you upgrade to Qlik Sense November 2018 (however, you will want to upgrade to Qlik NPrinting November 2018 in order to take advantage of the new functionality around on-demand request management).
As described in this blog, the on-demand reporting extension is part of the Dashboard extension bundle. It allows users to run reports from within a Qlik Sense app, taking their selections and applying them as filters to the resulting report. The user clicks a button which will generate a pre-defined Qlik NPrinting report populated with custom data based on the selections made at the time.
The on-demand extension can be combined with the show/hide container extension also available in the Dashboard bundle. Together, you can create powerful governance over who and when users can access the on-demand reporting capability.
Here is a video showing how the extension works.
